


a star for every wanderer

by smolsarcasticraspberry



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: AU where they live on a space station, F/M, sf au, shallura - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-21
Packaged: 2019-09-22 10:08:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 33,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17057810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smolsarcasticraspberry/pseuds/smolsarcasticraspberry
Summary: In orbit high above the planet Heliana, the crew of Arandin Station work day and night to keep their world's protective shield running smoothly. Like everyone else on the station, Shiro volunteered to come up here to help with the war effort - giving up a life planetside so that their world can remain safe from the threat of the Galra.But life on Arandin has its up sides. Like Allura, the pretty life systems tech who Shiro sees in the canteen every day. If only he were brave enough to actually talk to her…





	1. Dreams

**Author's Note:**

> so i'm aware that calling this a "SF AU" of a SF show isn't really that helpful of a description, but compared to canon!VLD this is a more grungy hard SF take rather than science fantasy. anyway just read it, it's got flirting and fluff and shallura goodness in these trying times.

_Let me not to the marriage of true minds_  
_Admit impediments. Love is not love_  
_Which alters when it alteration finds,_  
_Or bends with the remover to remove._  
_O no! it is an ever-fixed mark_  
_That looks on tempests and is never shaken;_  
_It is the star to every wand'ring bark,_  
_Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken._

_~ Shakespeare, Sonnet 116 ~_

## +

She likes chocolate pudding. It's the only thing he knows about her for certain. When the commissary has chocolate pudding, she sits at her usual table near the flickering holoscreens and savours her dessert with a blissful look on her face. Apart from that, she's a mystery.

What else? She has beautiful dark skin that stands out against the drab greys of the space station interiors. She wears her hair in a thick braid - and it's white, almost like moonlight, and really _impossibly_ long. He's seen her around in the suffocating noise of engine rooms, or running through the lower levels of the workshops on some errand, with her hair all bundled up onto her head in a messy bun. And he's seen the braid, which she wears most days. But he's never seen her hair down. Unlike everyone else on Arandin Station, she has pointy ears, and little pink marks on her cheeks. The rest of the crew are mostly Olkarians and Bytors and a few humans, but she's the only alien of her kind.

Her name is Allura Melnori, according to the name tag sewn onto the front of her green and grey overalls. The green and grey means she's on life systems, and Shiro is comms team (blue), which is why he never gets to talk to her. He's stuck observing her from afar and trying not to be a creep about it. She sits at lunch with her friends and talks and laughs and pulls a face at the horrible commissary coffee and Shiro tries desperately not to stare.

"Why don't you just go talk to her?" Hunk asks, as they queue up after lunch one day to put their trays back in the chute.

"Because I don't know her," Shiro says.

"Well, you won't _get_ to know her unless you start a conversation," Hunk points out. "Just say hi! Give her a smile!"

He nudges Shiro on the shoulder, and jerks his head at the table where Allura sits. Shiro risks a glance in her direction - just as she looks up. Her gaze meets his, and she smiles politely. She looks so pretty - and the moment is so unexpected - that Shiro stumbles and almost drops his tray. He catches his balance and looks back at her, his cheeks burning. She has a hand over her mouth to cover her grin, but there's warmth in her eyes, and she doesn't look away from him as he stashes his tray and hurries out.

## +

He shares a tiny, dim room with Hunk, where all the accoutrements of living are folded up impossibly tight, like a life-sized origami cube. Each bunk sits high on the wall, and the space underneath is taken up with a small desk and a storage unit. The walls and floor are the same drab grey as most of the station, with the addition of adjustable lights and a holoscreen to make the place feel more homely.

At least he gets along well with Hunk.

He sits on his bed and pours his daily nutrient mix into a mug of warm water, and sips it as he stares out the tiny window. Heliana floats below them, bright against the backdrop of stars, and the flickering lights of civilisation wink up at him. This is the planet they're sworn to protect; this is why they all live here, manning the space stations, keeping the protective net running day and night. The net itself crackles in the sky: narrow beams of greenish light that arc for hundreds of miles between the stations, faintly visible against the background glow of the planet. Heliana slumbers safe from the Galra, thanks to the station workers who maintain its defences.

He volunteered for this. They all did. How could they not?

He downs the last of his daily, and picks up the scanner from his bedside. He holds the device up to the implant at the back of his neck, and waits for the beep that tells him the monitor has picked up his vitals. The tab by his bedside lights up, and the results ping on the screen: heartrate good, breathing good, blood sugars within range… everything comes back green.

"You're really good with your self-checks," Hunk observes, from the other bunk. "I forget half the time. The medics are always telling me off."

"You want me to remind you?" Shiro jokes.

Hunk chuckles. "Nah, it's cool, let the doc handle it."

"Alright, fine. But if you get radiation sickness and forget your own name, that's on you."

"Ugh, you're so dramatic," Hunk grumbles. He throws his bundled up socks at Shiro, who laughs and swats them away easily.

"Don't say I didn't warn you."

"Yeah, yeah," Hunk grins at him. "Night, Shiro."

He rolls over, and soon his snoring echoes in the tight space of their dorm. Shiro dims the lights, and watches the stars outside the window and the faint glow of the shield, humming away in the background, until he drifts off to sleep.

## +

He dreams of a lion with golden eyes; a beast of metal and magic who lives under strange stars.

He doesn't remember ever seeing a giant robot lion on Arandin Station. But he dreams of this black lion almost every night.

The lion lives in a castle in the sky, all white towers and vaulted ceilings and windows looking out onto the impossible reaches of space. Sometimes, he dreams he's walking through the castle, down towards the hangar where the lion waits for him. Tonight, he just dreams of the endless, empty plain where the lion lives, and her golden eyes watching him as he walks beneath the stars.

## +

The comms workshop is a large and busy place, the lower level taken up with long, battered work benches, whilst the metal walkways of the upper level house storage lockers and stacks of equipment. Shiro keeps a tin cup of coffee at his station as he works on dismantling a broadcast box with Hunk and finding out what's wrong with it.

"Hey."

The voice startles him, and he turns around to find Allura hovering uncertainly between the benches, her hair in the familiar messy bun and a tab clutched in both hands. Her eyes dart over the mess and grime of the workstations until she looks back at Shiro.

"It's Takashi, isn't it?" she asks.

He blinks at her, utterly thrown.

"That's right," he says. He's acutely aware of Hunk standing beside him, probably smirking, and he tries desperately to ignore him.

"You're on the EVA team, aren't you?" she asks. "We have a job together tomorrow, I think."

He stares from her face to the tab in her hands, and the context clicks into place. This is a work call. They've been assigned on the same rota, somehow.

"Sure," he says. "Lemme take a look."

He leads her to a corner of the workshop, away from the noise and clatter of the comms team taking apart transistors and convertors and patching up antenna arrays. A pair of battered sofas are tucked into the corner of the room, and Shiro sits on one to look at the work spec in the tab that Allura's holding.

She sits down next to him. Up close, her skin is so flawless it seems to glow from within. Shiro rubs a hand across the back of his neck, and his fingers find the bump of the implant and its metal housing, embedded into his nape. He traces the shape of it absentmindedly - a nervous habit - and tries to concentrate on the tab in front of him and not… Allura's… whole thing.

"There's a feed line under one of the external panels that needs fixing," she says. "They said a comm tech was going out there anyway, and I should tag along."

Shiro looks at the schematic on her tab, and nods. "I'm running a routine check on the relays out on sector 16. So I can take you out there and help you fix it."

Her eyes light up. "You'd do that? I'm supposed to fix it myself."

"Yeah, but the work gets done faster if I help you out," he says with a shrug. "Don't worry about it."

"Thank you." She plays with the cuff of her overalls. "I haven't done many EVAs. I get nervous when I go outside."

Shiro gives her his best reassuring grin. "Don't be nervous. I'll be with you the whole time."

"I know, I just…" She looks up at him, a slight frown tugging at her brow. "Don't you get scared of the void? All that emptiness out there?"

"Not really," he says. "I always kinda liked it."

She looks at him with an odd smile on her face. Then she absently tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and stands up.

"That's fair, I suppose," she says. "I'll see you tomorrow, then?"

Shiro nods, and stands up after her.

"Thank you," she says, and she turns to leave. He wants to follow her across the room, but he resists.

He can't believe they have a job together tomorrow. After weeks of trying to get up the courage to talk to her… she walks right into his workshop. He hides his grin and gets back to work.

## +

The medic picks up on his excitement when he goes in for his weekly check-up a few hours later. Doctor Blake comes from a humanoid species called the Tavi - the most common species on Heliana. She is tall and striking to look at; the red frills on her head a stark contrast to the paleness of her skin, and her eyes a piercing blue above a flattened nose and a protruding, beak-like mouth. But she gives Shiro a warm smile as he comes into her lab and hops up on the gurney. She hooks up his implant to the monitor and scrolls through the readings, one clawed hand resting on her hip.

"Heart rate's a little elevated," she says, as she reads out his vitals from the screen. "Have you been exerting yourself?"

"A little," Shiro says, because he'd rather not explain that his pulse is going a mile a minute over a pretty girl. "I walked here quite fast."

"Hmm." Doctor Blake taps at the monitor a few times, and types some notes into her wrist tab.

"Your iron's okay, but your calcium is a little low," she says cheerfully. "I'll tweak your dailies. Any headaches? Trouble sleeping?"

"No, nothing."

"Brain function all looks good," she goes on. "The modulator in your chip is working just fine. But it's important that you tell me at once if there's any changes. Any unusual moods? Difficulties concentrating?"

Shiro shakes his head. "Nothing." Aside from elation over actually getting to talk to Allura, but he's not about to mention that. "Why do you always ask so much about my moods, anyway?"

Doctor Blake looks up from her monitor. She sets aside her tab and gives him the warmth of her undivided attention. "Mental changes can be the first sign of something serious. Working this far beyond a planetary atmosphere, there are many invisible dangers. Radiation, carbon monoxide… I'm sure you're aware of how many hazards there are. Often, the first we know of these things is someone coming in with a headache. Or feeling tired and irritable for no reason. And then of course, there's the net itself."

Right. The net. Longterm exposure to the shield's energy can cause memory loss or personality changes or complete mental breakdowns, according to widely-established station folklore. Although all they got told in orientation was that it could 'affect brain function'.

"Oh. So can it really make us go stir crazy? I thought all these checks were just because you cared about our wellbeing."

Doctor Black chuckles, and reaches for her tab again. "Is that what they told you in orientation? Because it's true, of course. The risk of mental distress is quite high in a station like this, and so we monitor crew wellbeing quite closely. But there is the added factor of over-exposure to a very powerful radiation source. It's important that we keep an eye on everyone's mental state."

"I'm not vac-addled, if that's what you're asking," Shiro says. His hands grip the edge of the bed - one flesh and bone, the other a prosthetic in white and blue. The relic of a bad accident on another station, before he came here.

Blake gives him another reassuring smile. "I never said you were," she says. "But you do a lot of EVAs, correct? Spending that much time in the void of space can cause mental disturbances. And you're far closer to the net than most people, with less shielding. The modulator in your implant will help to regulate your serotonin and dopamine levels, and hopefully combat any ill effects, but it's still important that you tell me about anything that's bothering you."

"I will," Shiro says quickly. "Thanks, doc."

Blake's eyebrows raise at the over-familiarity, and the plumes on her head fan out a little, but she doesn't say anything as Shiro picks up his dailies for the week ahead and lets himself out of the lab.

## +

Sometimes, in his dreams, the lion talks to him. Not in words but in feelings; huge shapeless sensations that wash over him like waves.

It's oddly comforting.

He dreams of the magic castle again, and he wonders if the lion is showing him her home in some far distant stretch of the cosmos.

Sometimes, he gets the impression that she's waiting for him.

## +

Allura meets him by the airlocks the next day, in the prep room where the e-vec suits are stored. While he waits for her to show up, he sits and chats with Chahar - an experienced Tavi engineer who oversees most of the EVAs for the comm team. When Allura arrives, she looks tense. She fidgets with her tab and her toolbelt, and glances anxiously around the prep room. The e-vec suits stand in rows against one wall, with the safety equipment lined up in boxes and crates on the other side of the room. The harsh white lights illuminate a huge warning poster near the airlock doors, and the words 'HAVE YOU CHECKED YOUR SUIT SEAL?' in huge black letters.

"Are you nervous?" Shiro asks.

"A little," Allura says. She eyes the warning notice and its terrifying messages, and chews at her lip.

"Don't worry," Shiro tells her. "It's easier than it looks. Especially when you're with a comm tech."

"Why are all comm techs so annoyingly over-confident?" Allura arches an eyebrow at him, but she smiles as she says it, and Shiro finds himself grinning.

"Tell you what," he says. "If we get out there, and you decide this confidence is misplaced, you can make fun of me all you want when we get back."

He holds her gaze, and watches her smile battle with her scowl, until she gives up and rolls her eyes at him.

"Fine," she says, her eyes sparkling. "Help me put my suit on?"

He helps her slip her legs and arms into the e-vec suit as Chahar runs down the prEVA checklist and programmes directions into their wrist units. Shiro checks over Allura's vitals on her suit, and hooks up the e-vec's biomonitors to the implant on the back of her neck. Then he turns around so she can do the same for him. Finally, he helps her buckle the toolbelt around her waist and check the lines are in place to prevent the tools from drifting away from them once they get outside.

"All set?" he asks.

She nods, and he helps her slip her head into her helmet and close the clasps. The commlink crackles, and he hears her rapid breathing over the earpiece in his own helmet.

"Relax," he tells her. "You'll short out your chip."

She gives him another stern look, but her breathing levels out, and the biomonitor on her suit shows her pulse settling down. At least she's calmer. Shiro takes the tether line and hooks it to each of their suits in turn. Allura watches him as he steps up to her and attaches the thick metal cable to the loop on her belt. He tugs at the lock to make sure it's secure, and inadvertently pulls Allura towards him; she takes a half-step, eyes wide with surprise, and her hands fly out and land on his chest. He reaches for her waist to steady her, without even thinking about it, and then hastily draws his hand back.

"Sorry," he says.

She doesn't step away. She just looks up at him from within her helmet, and a playful spark flickers in her eyes.

"You did that on purpose," she says. "Is that a comm tech's go-to move?"

He doesn't quite know what to say to that. He's spent so many weeks gazing longingly at her from afar that he's not quite sure how to react to her being up close and personal and mildly flirtatious.

Maybe he should flirt back.

"Is it working?" he quips.

Allura smirks. "Not yet," she says sweetly.

She looks so pretty that Shiro almost falls over his own feet again. But at least she's not nervous, and that's all that counts.

## +

Chahar seals them into the airlock, and the computer gives them the countdown until the outer hatch slides open and the artificial gravity shuts down. They drift gently off the floor, and Shiro swings out of the door and grabs the guide rail that leads out to the access panels. He pulls himself around and kicks his heels together, and the mag boots on his suit activate and clamp down onto the space station's curved surface. The jolt reverberates through his body, and he stands there on the station's hull, under the dark sky full of stars, and he straightens up and turns back to Allura.

She hesitates in the entrance, her eyes scanning the stars and the planet above them. The green glow of the net casts her face in strange shadows and highlights.

"Come on," Shiro says. "Just swing yourself out."

"I don't know how you can just stand there under all this sky," she says, her voice tinny in his ear.

"You get used to it." He holds out a hand to her. "Come on. Don't look out there. Just look at me."

So she does. He takes her hand and helps her step out onto the station. She keeps her eyes fixed on him the entire time, as if he's her anchor to the universe, and he smiles encouragingly at her as she fumbles for the guide rail and awkwardly twists herself around. Her mag boots connect to the station's hull, next to the rail, and finally she stands beside him.

"See? Not so hard."

She huffs out a tiny breath. "I hate that part. It's so disorienting."

"The trick is to look at the edge of the station," Shiro says. He points ahead, to where the silvery metal of Arandin curves out of sight, bright against the black sky. "See? It looks like a horizon. That gives you an up and down."

"Oh," she says quietly. He gives her a moment to stand there and get her bearings, and as she gazes out at the stars she keeps a tight hold on his hand. He doesn't have the heart to let go. He fumbles with the coupling link on the tether, and gets it locked to the guide rail with one hand, and then he tugs on Allura's arm to rouse her from the mesmerising effects of the outside.

"Don't get vac-addled on me, Princess," he says.

The nickname slips out unprompted, flung up by some fanciful part of his subconscious. Allura turns and gives him that same quizzical, amused look.

"I'm not a Princess," she says.

"You look like one," he tells her with a smile.

"And what does that make you?" she teases. "My knight in shining armour?"

"If you like."

She rolls her eyes, but she's grinning nonetheless. Shiro drops her hand and turns back to the rail, so he can lead them both up and out onto Arandin's hull. Nothing makes a sound out here; there's no clank of his boots against the metal, no scrape of the coupling on the rail, no rustle of wind. Shiro is used to the eeriness of it, but he worries about Allura and her lack of experience.

"Stay close to me," he says into the comm. "Don't stretch the tether too much."

"Are you worried I'll float away?" she asks.

"No. I'm just lonely."

The joke has the desired effect; Allura's musical laugh echoes in his earpiece, and even though he can't see her face he can sense her amusement. When she speaks again, her voice is light and playful instead of tense.

"I won't leave you alone, don't worry," she says.

"Thank you, Princess. I appreciate that."

She laughs again, and lapses into silence. He times her breaths over the commlink; an old habit from EVA training, where they learned to keep tabs on walkmates. You don't want to hear frantic, panicked breathing over the comms when you're half a mile from the nearest airlock.

He did his basic e-vec training planetside, like most people, but the real training didn't start until you got out of atmo and up into the void and you had to actually stand on the metal skin of a station and look out at the emptiness and dare it not to blink back. Someone must have told him that, once. The vague memory of a stern-faced senior officer surfaces in his mind, the man yelling at him to focus and ground himself in his own body.

"I've seen you around in the canteen," Allura says, and her voice drags him out of the muddle of the past and into the present. "Everyone calls you Shiro, don't they?"

His heart almost stops beating. She noticed him? Really?

"Well, most people," he manages.

"Should I not have called you Takashi?"

"No, it's fine." More than fine. _Better_ than fine. For some reason he never uses his first name except with close friends, so whenever she says it - her tongue rolling deftly over the foreign syllables - it feels oddly intimate. Even though everyone else up here uses first names all the time.

The guide rail takes them across a walkway that spans a cleft in the station's exterior. Pipes and grates the size of buildings crowd the trench below them; ladders climb like tiny threads up the sides of vents you could drown in. Lights flicker in the gloom, red and orange against the dark shapes and shadows. The tall spear of a distributor array rises up beside the gantry, dizzyingly tall, and Shiro follows the line of it towards the distant peak, where a metal ring throws out bars of energy into the net.

Chahar's voice comes over the commlink, distorted by static from the array.

"Check in, e-vec team," he says.

"Shirogane, SAM," Shiro says back, automatically.

"Melnori, SAM," Allura responds.

"You're looking good, vitals all within ranges," Chahar relays back. "Proceed."

They keep going, and step off the walkway onto the other side of the machine trench. Up ahead, the slope of the station's exterior runs up to a vertical rise, like a metal cliff covered in pipes and panels and ports. The guide rail connects to a ladder, nestled between the equipment.

"So how did you come to be on Arandin?" Shiro asks, as they clunk towards the ladder.

"I volunteered to be here," Allura says. "How could I not? As soon as I found out about this part of the war effort, I knew I had to come up here."

"Right." Shiro nods, although Allura probably won't see it from behind him. He's heard that same story from many people. Most of Arandin's crew is made up of volunteers.

"What about you?" Allura asks.

 _I've always loved space_ , he thinks, but what he says is: "I volunteered, same as you. I wanted to give back to Heliana."

"That young man you're always with… Hunk? Is he your roommate, or…?"

Shiro reaches the ladder, and pauses with his foot on the first rung as he tries to decipher the tone of her voice.

"He's an old friend," he says. "We transferred here together from another station." The exact name of it escapes him right now; the memory frustrating and elusive, like a word on the tip of his tongue that he can't bring into focus. He still can't wrap his head around the fact that he's talking to Allura, finally, after _weeks_ , and it makes it hard to think straight. But him and Hunk have been friends for _years_. He resumes his ascent of the ladder, and glances over his shoulder to make sure Allura is following him a few rungs below.

"So you two aren't…?" she asks.

Shiro laughs. "No. Hunk has someone, anyway. She's called Shay. She's a Balmeran."

"How did he meet a Balmeran?"

"I don't know. It was before we got here, I think."

How _did_ Hunk meet Shay? He never asked him, although he can clearly picture the two of them sitting on a bench in the sunlight, talking and laughing. They make a cute couple.

He reaches the top of the ladder and climbs up onto the next section of the station. He turns to wait for Allura, and she emerges just after him, looking apprehensive. She didn't like the ladder, he's guessing.

"It's not far now," he reassures her.

The commlink crackles again, and Chahar's voice comes over sounding tired and annoyed.

"Cut the chatter, e-vec team," he warns. "You have jobs to do out there."

"Oh - sorry, sir," Allura says. Shiro catches her gaze and rolls his eyes, and she chuckles and tries to pretend it was a cough.

## +

They find their respective access panels, with Chahar's assistance, and set to work. Shiro's routine checks don't take long; he's done this dozens of times, and he rattles through the list without trouble. Allura, on the other hand, takes longer. After half an hour, Shiro is finished with his own task, and he propels himself over to where Allura hovers near the panel.

"You doing okay?" he asks.

"I know what I'm supposed to do, I'm just slow," she says apologetically.

"Lemme help you."

Chahar tuts, over the commlink. One the one hand, this is a breach in protocol; but on the other, Shiro's help will speed things up, and even Chahar sounds impatient to be finished.

"The line keeps slipping out when I try to tighten the casing," Allura says.

"Okay. I'll hold it in place and you tighten it, got it?"

Allura nods gratefully, and Shiro slips his hands into the panel and grasps the offending feed line.

"Don't know why they send such incompetent workers to our sector," Chahar grumbles. "We could've been done by now."

"Knock it off, Chahar, you're not helping," Shiro says. He watches Allura's face, and tries to read the emotion behind her withdrawn expression. She knows she's slow. But she's nervous, and Chahar is making it worse.

"Ignore him," Shiro tells her. The impertinence will get him in trouble later, because Chahar outranks him, but he doesn't care. Allura glances up at him and gives him a tiny, weak smile.

They get the feed line fixed with a little manoeuvring, and Shiro talks Allura through it even though Chahar grumbles in his ear half the time. Eventually, it's done, and Chahar gives them the order to pack up and come back in. Shiro helps Allura stow her tools on her belt, and they make their way back the way they came, following the guide rail down the ladder to the lower level.

"See? Not so bad," Shiro says.

"I was really slow," Allura says behind him.

"You were fine," he assures her, but Chahar's voice cuts him off.

"No, you weren't 'fine'," he says testily. "You were far too slow, Melnori. I'm recommending you for remedial EVA training."

Allura groans, and Shiro scowls within the privacy of his suit. Chahar can be a grumpy ass at times, but even for him this feels vindictive. He wants to tell Allura not to worry about it, but… Chahar can still hear their every word.

He glances over his shoulder and smiles at her, because it's the best he can do. A few minutes later, they arrive back at the trench and the walkway that spans the crowded expanse of machinery. Shiro steps out over the chasm, but when he reaches the distributor array he hears Allura's breath hitch over the comms.

He turns to face her. She stares down at the machinery below them, her eyes wide and far away. Even at this distance, the rumble of moving parts makes the walkway tremble. Allura stands by the rail, eerily still.

"You won't fall," Shiro says softly. "The tether will catch you before you get far. And you'd just drift down anyway."

She says nothing. The biomonitor on her suit pulses in time with her heartbeat - too rapid, by the looks of it. Shiro takes her by the shoulder and pulls her around to face him.

"Allura," he says, and his voice seems to snap her out of whatever mesmer held her transfixed. "Are you alright?"

"Sorry," she says. "I just… it's nothing."

"You sure?"

Her expression softens into a smile. "I'm fine, honestly. Are you always this attentive to lowly life systems techs?"

He probably shouldn't rise to that. But… her eyes sparkle as she looks up at him, and it would be nice to hear her laugh again.

"Only the pretty ones," he says.

She chuckles delightedly. Maybe she took it as a joke, but at least she's smiling and relaxed and not staring into nothing, haunted by strange ghosts.

"Say again, over-- Shirogane--" Chahar's voice comes over the link, warped by static and noise. The distributor is right above them, churning out impossible amounts of energy. It creates a comms blank spot; the interference scrambles the signals back to the relay, so the only clear comm line is the short-range between their suits. Another wave of static crackles in his ear, and Shiro has an idea.

"You wanna see something cool?" he asks.

Allura stares at him, eyes wide. "What?"

He reaches for the edge of her helmet, and the master switch that shuts down her transmitter.

"Do you trust me?" he asks.

Amusement dances in her eyes, and she nods. She lets him shut down her comms relay entirely, and then he switches off his own. The static cuts out, and they stand there in the silence of the void, staring at each other.

Shiro steps up close to her, and puts his hands on the thick neck section of her suit. He holds her steady, and leans down to press the glass of his helmet against hers. The sound of her caught breath echoes through to him as their visors transmit the tiny vibrations of noise from her helmet to his.

"Now no one else can hear us," he says, and Allura's eyes light up as she realises what's happening, and how they're still talking without the comms.

"Chahar will get cross with us," she says.

"He'll think it's noise from the array blocking the signal," Shiro says. "It's just the two of us. He can't listen in."

Her hands settle on his waist, and she clings to him instead of the safety rail. They stand toe to toe and forehead to forehead, connected by their helmets and hands.

"What could you possibly have to say to me that you don't want Chahar to hear?" Allura asks.

Shiro takes a deep breath. Heaven only knows what his bio readings are right now, but he doesn't care. The playful spark in Allura's eyes lends him some wild, reckless courage.

"I think you're really beautiful," he says. "But I'm always too scared to talk to you."

Allura laughs softly. In the light of Heliana, floating in the sky above them, she seems to glow with warmth.

"You don't have to be scared of me." She tilts her head to one side, and it's playful and cute and utterly irresistible. "You can talk to me if you want. I don't mind."

"Can I sit with you at dinner?" Shiro asks. Quite where that burst of courage came from, he's not sure, but he'll ride that high as far as it'll take him.

Allura smiles at him. "Of course. That sounds nice."

"Yeah?"

"Yes." She nods.

Shiro grins at her. He leans his head away from hers, and switches their comms back on. The link hums in his ear, and Chahar's voice comes over the static.

"E-vec team, I repeat, check in please."

"Shirogane, SAM. Melnori, SAM," Shiro responds for both of them. "Sorry. We got caught in the blank spot. We're on our way in."

He ignores Chahar's complaining, and leads Allura back to the airlock. He feels so elated he might drift away. Even _with_ the mag boots.

## +

They sit together at dinner, and Shiro can hardly believe it. Hunk is too proud of him to complain about being ditched, and all Allura's friends watch them curiously from across the room, and they sit at a table together in the busy canteen with their dinner trays. And eat. And talk.

Shiro tries not to think of it as a 'date'. Even though he got here by calling Allura pretty. But still.

"See, EVAs aren't so bad," he says. "It was fine in the end, wasn't it?"

"Only because you were there," Allura says, and his heart skips several beats in a row.

"Now I have to do extra training." Allura pulls a face, and stabs at her food with a fork.

"Well, they might let you pick your trainer," Shiro says. "And I'm on the EVA rota."

"So you could take me out?" Her eyes light up, and Shiro smiles at her.

"Yeah. Maybe."

"I don't mind if I get to do it with you," she says. Here, in the bright lights of the canteen, he spots the warmth of a blush in her cheeks.

"I'll see what I can pull off," he says, and she smiles at him, and that's quickly becoming his favourite view in the universe. The rest of the canteen chatters around him, and outside the viewing window along one wall the shield flickers like green lightning above the planet's surface. But he looks at Allura, and it all fades away into irrelevance.

"So where were you, before Arandin?" she asks.

A name rises up from his memory, finally. "Voltron."

Allura frowns. "I've never heard of Voltron Station."

Station…? Oh. Right. He already told her about the station he was on before, with Hunk. When they were outside on walk.

"Yeah, me and Hunk both worked there. That's where I had my accident."

He holds up his right arm, and Allura runs her gaze down the white panels, outlined in a faint blue glow.

"I'm so sorry," she says. "May I…?"

Her hand hovers over his forearm, and he nods. She traces her fingers across the planes of his arm, from the bicep to the elbow to the hand.

"It's amazing," she murmurs. "Can you feel that?"

"Yeah, I can."

"Oh - sorry." She pulls her hand away.

"Don't be," Shiro says. "It's okay."

She runs her hand down the arm again, and stops at the wrist. There's a small closed panel around the point where a pulse would be on a flesh-and-blood arm, and she traces the square shape of it with her finger.

Shiro watches her face. The marks under her eyes shimmer slightly, as if lit up from within. Perhaps it's an alien thing.

"What's inside?" she asks.

"There's a power source and the internal mechanisms," Shiro says. "But I'm not supposed to open it. I might damage the workings."

"It's a beautiful piece of engineering," Allura says. She traces his metal fingers with her own, and then pulls back and tucks some loose strands of her hair behind her ears.

"And now you're here," she goes on.

"Having dinner with someone from life systems," Shiro says. "An outright betrayal of comms team."

Allura laughs. It's nice to hear it up close, without the e-vec suits coming between them. She puts down her cutlery and swirls her terrible commissary coffee around in the mug.

"You're right," she says, mock-serious. "We can't possibly risk doing this again. We are from two different worlds."

"Do you want to do it again?" Shiro asks.

She looks at him, and taps her fingers on the coffee mug, and Shiro holds his breath.

"Yes. I think I do."

He huffs out his breath in a laugh, and clinks his coffee mug against hers.

"To inter-departmental diplomacy," he jokes, and it makes Allura smile.

## +

They eat dinner together almost every day after that. At lunch Allura sits with her friends, but at dinner she takes her tray to Shiro's table and sits down opposite him with a playful smile. Shiro doesn't question his good fortune. He just does his best to entertain her and make her laugh.

Her species is called 'Alteans', he learns. They are - apparently - similar to humans in physiology and appearance, except for the pointed ears.

Shiro saves her chocolate pudding cups, and pretends he doesn't like them so she can eat his as well as her own. He tells her funny stories from the comms team, and jokes that he feels like a spy. She talks about life systems, and the plants she takes care of in the artificial habs, and her favourite spots to sit and watch the planet turning gently beneath them.

She is every bit as magical up close.

## +

"I dreamed about you," she announces one day. It's been less than a week since their EVA, but Allura is charmingly forward and direct and unflustered. She grins at Shiro mischievously as she takes her seat, as if daring him to ask her what the dream was about.

"Oh really?" He plays along, one eyebrow raised at her, and she chuckles.

"Not like that. I had a dream about our walk."

"Oh," he says. "A bad dream?"

She shrugs. "Sort of. I always have anxious dreams after I do an EVA. It's partly why I hate going outside so much. But this time… you were there. I drifted off the station, but you caught me. And I didn't feel scared."

"See, this is what happens when you hang around with a comm tech too long," Shiro teases. "You dream about us. It's inevitable."

"Ugh, you're such a brat," she laughs. "So what do you dream about, then? Mr Fearless Astronaut Man."

"I dream about weird, inexplicable bullshit. Like a normal person."

Allura sticks a chunk of protein complex in her mouth, and waves a fork at him.

"Like what? Tell me. I told you mine."

He hesitates. But she smiles at him, her expression delightfully open and playful, and it feels safe to tell her this strange thing he's never told anyone else.

"I dream about a magic castle in the stars," he says. "And a lion that lives there."

Allura's face creases into a frown. She leans forward, suddenly serious and conspiratorial.

"Is it all white on the inside? With lots of arches everywhere?"

Shiro blinks at her in shock. Because… it is.

"Yeah," he says quietly. "And all the lights are…"

"Blue? Blue lights?"

"Yes!" He whispers it, because some deep-seated instinct cautions him that shared dreams are not something to be blurted out in the commissary over dinner.

"I've had that dream!" Allura says. Her eyes go wide, and she glances around to make sure they haven't been overheard. "Do you think it's from a show? Or a film?"

"Maybe," he says. "But I don't remember ever watching a story like that."

"Perhaps it was when we were very young," Allura says. "I don't remember seeing it either. But… that must be it, right?"

Shiro thinks about this. It makes sense.

"Probably, yeah," he concedes.

Allura sits back up, and picks up her fork again.

"Isn't it funny that we dreamed about the same obscure thing, though," she says. "I wonder why?"

Shiro doesn't have a good answer to that. He thinks back to what Blake said, about the effect the net can have on people. Perhaps it's just the wild energies of unprotected space reaching into their brainwaves and modulating their thoughts. Or maybe it's fate that they dreamed of the same quiet castle drifting through starry skies.

But if Allura dreamed of it too, that means the castle might be a real place. Well… a real fake story, anyway. But not a fantasy. Something that actually existed; that he saw or heard about. And for some reason he rather likes that thought.

## +

At his next weekly check-in, Doctor Blake remarks on his good mood.

"Elevated serotonin and dopamine levels," she says, reading off the screen. "Someone's cheerful."

"Yeah, I'm just… enjoying work this week." He doesn't want to mention Allura. He doesn't know exactly what they have between them just yet, and for some reason their growing closeness feels… forbidden. There's no strict rule against fraternising outside of your department, but the different teams tend to stick to themselves, and he doesn't want to get Allura into any kind of trouble.

"No major changes in routine? Or anything like that?" Blake asks. Her eyes bore into him, but that's just a Tavi thing; her tone remains light and friendly.

He shakes his head. "I had some memory problems," he says quickly, because he doesn't want to talk about his dinner routine with Allura.

Blake frowns, and taps at the screen a few times.

"What kind of issues?"

"I had trouble remembering a few things," he says. "Like the name of the station I was on before I came here."

"Ah. Fuzzy recall," Doctor Blake says. She gives him a reassuring smile. "It's not uncommon. The exposure to so much electromagnetic radiation can disrupt memory access, but the memories are all still in there. Did you recall the name of the station eventually?"

"Oh, yeah, it came back to me later," Shiro says.

"That's fine, then. Trust me - without your implant, the effects would be a lot worse. But I'll tweak it for you and see if we can help with it."

"Thanks, doc."

Blake gives him another stern look for the informality, and adjusts some dials on her screen that fine-tune the implant's functions.

"Any other problems?" she asks. "Intrusive thoughts? Nightmares? Disturbed sleep?"

_A magic castle flying through the stars, and a lion that tries to talk to him…_

"No. Nothing."

Blake nods, and runs through the rest of her checks, and then lets Shiro go with his latest batch of dailies and a reassuring pat on the shoulder. On his way back to the canteen for dinner, Shiro wonders if he should have told her about the odd dreams. She's there to help, after all. And she must be a volunteer like everyone else here. But he's not by nature a sharing type of person. And she mentioned mental disturbances. A few strange dreams probably don't count. Even if Allura had the same ones.

## +

Allura arrives at dinner in a foul mood, and flops down in her chair in a sulk.

"What's the matter?" Shiro asks.

"I just found out about my EVA retraining," she says. "It's with Chahar."

"Ouch." Shiro pulls a face. "Maybe it won't be so bad?"

Allura shoots him a withering look. "Really? He's out to get me. I can feel it."

She prods angrily at her food, and Shiro shelves his own concerns about the dreams and the memories and dedicates his dinner time to cheering her up.

## +

He dreams of the lion again. She's huge and black and overwhelming, and she stands on a barren plain under impossible stars and roars at him. Her eyes shine gold, as bright as the sun, and he shields his face and looks away.

Thoughts roll over him: longing and anger and fear and betrayal. The black lion paces towards him, taller than buildings. Here, in the empty dream space, Shiro does not fear her. He lets her come; lets her lie down and press her huge, metal face to him.

He lays a hand on her jaw, and the smooth surface tingles under his touch.

She calls out to him, somewhere in his mind; a wordless cry of longing and need. But he has never met a giant beast made of metal; never seen a lion with golden eyes.

The dream fades away, and he wakes with a start, and finds his hands clenched into fists.

## +

A few days later, he goes to pick up Allura from her lab for dinner. The life systems department is full of plants and hydro-tanks, and the sound of dripping water and gently whirring fans. Shiro steps into Allura's lab, past the vertical garden with its wall-to-ceiling greenery - moss, mostly, and various nutrient-dense consumables. He makes his way between the humid glass houses and comes out into the workspace in the back.

He finds Allura sat at her workbench crying. The sight of her so upset makes his chest tight. He sits down next to her, and lays a gentle hand on her shoulder.

"Hey," he says softly. "It's me. What happened?"

She looks up at him through tears.

"I had my EVA training," she sobs. "It was horrible."

"Oh, no," he says. "Chahar? What did he do?"

Her breath hitches, and Shiro wraps his arm around her shoulder and pulls her close to him. They have never hugged before; in fact, this is as close as they've ever been. It's sorta nice - except that Allura is still crying and Shiro doesn't know how to fix it. He leans his head against hers and squeezes her arm.

"Come on. Tell me."

"He kept yelling at me," she says through her tears. "Even when I was trying to be faster, or get upright or whatever. I was always too slow. And when he yelled I got scared and it made it worse."

"He's a terrible teacher," Shiro says.

"I know I'm slow and I'm not very good at it…"

"You're not that bad," Shiro tells her. "Honestly, you're not. Chahar's just mean. For no reason."

"He unhooked my tether," she whispers, and Shiro sits up instantly. A chill runs down his spine. That's a _huge_ breach of safety protocol; no one should _ever_ undo the tether. Especially with a nervous and inexperienced trainee. What's Chahar's game? It feels _beyond_ vindictive.

"He shouldn't have done that," Shiro says sternly. "Was anyone else there?"

"No," Allura sobs. "Just me and him. He unhooked me and told me he'd push me off the station if I made another mistake. I was so scared, Takashi, I thought I would…"

"It's alright, you're alright now," Shiro says. He pulls her closer and wraps both arms around her, and she turns and buries her face in his shoulder and cries.

"He can't do that," Shiro goes on. Anger burns through him at the thought of it. How can Chahar be that cruel? What's the point of it? "You didn't do anything wrong. You should complain to the Stat-Mas. That's not training, it's just Chahar fucking with you."

"I went to Brigdun," Allura says quietly. "But she just told me I volunteered for this, so I can't complain. But I didn't volunteer to be yelled at! Or… or _that_!"

Shiro curses under his breath, and rubs soothing circles on Allura's back. He's at a loss for what else to do. The Station Master ought to intervene; pull Chahar from training rotas, lay down some discipline, reinforce the rules. But Chahar is so senior and experienced that even the Stat-Mas cuts him as much slack as he wants.

"I'll talk to Chahar, if you like," Shiro offers. "Tell him not to mess with you."

But Allura shakes her head. She looks up at him, and wipes her face on her sleeve.

"You'll just make things worse," she says. "Please. The retraining is done now. I just… want to forget about it."

"But he shouldn't have done those things."

"I know. I know, but… Brigdun won't punish him for it, so what else can I do? Can we just… go for dinner? Please?"

He nods, and gets up. Allura takes a moment to wipe her face and blow her nose, and then they make their way back out past the plants and habitats and out into the corridor. She still looks miserable, though. Shiro reaches for her hand, and when he threads his fingers through hers she doesn't protest.

## +

Allura is quiet as they eat. Shiro tries to cheer her up with silly, pointless stories, but Chahar rattled her badly, and she barely smiles. Shiro seeks around for something to distract her with, and settles on an idea. He's been saving it for when he built up the nerve to act on all the hints she keeps dropping, but… Allura needs cheering up.

"Hey." He puts his hand over hers, and she looks up from her tray of half-eaten food. "Do you want to go to the observation deck later?"

Her eyes go wide. The observation deck has a reputation as a date spot. It's situated on Arandin's starside, not planetside, meaning the huge windows look out into the depths of space rather than down at the blues and greens of Heliana below. Most of the crew consider the starside view inferior, and so the observation deck has become a quiet and secluded spot where people mostly go to hook up.

Allura knows all that. The realisation flashes clearly in her eyes and cuts through the gloom that hangs over her. Shiro just asked her on a date, because no matter how nerdy you are… you don't ask someone to the obs deck unless you want to make out. Allura searches his face, and her expression turns from shock to guarded delight.

"Alright," she says. "That sounds nice."

She turns back to her food, and Shiro tries to remember how to breathe.

## +

They ride the elevator down to the observation deck in silence, and Shiro rubs a hand against his neck and feels the bump of his implant under his fingers. His heart races against his ribs. _The observation deck_. A date under the stars. With _Allura_. He risks a glance over at her, and sees her chewing on her bottom lip and playing with the cuffs of her overalls. She seems nervous, too.

The elevator glides to a halt, and Shiro offers Allura his hand as the doors open. She gives him a shy smile, and hooks her fingers over his. The doors to the obs deck swing open in front of them, and they step inside.

As usual, the vast hall is mostly deserted, and the lights are turned down low. A floor-to-ceiling picture window takes up all of one wall, curving at the edges to offer a wider view of the stars outside. Galleries dot the wall - floating platforms, each with their own sofas and cushions, offering some semblance of privacy. Some of the galleries are occupied, but Shiro tries not to look too closely, because people do all sorts of things in the observation deck, where the welcoming darkness makes even strangers bold.

A bored-looking overseer looks up from his tab as they come in. Like most of the overseers, he's Tavi, with the distinctive pale skin and head frills.

"Can we get a gallery, please?" Shiro asks.

The overseer looks them up and down, and then hands them a key card from his stack and goes back to whatever he's doing on the tab. Shiro takes the key card and inserts it into the control station by the door, and a hovering gallery glides down towards them and comes to a halt. He holds Allura's hand as she steps in, and he settles in beside her, and the gallery rises up once again and stops up near the domed window.

From here, they can see the cosmos spread out before them. Shiro stands by the gallery rail and drinks in the sight of it, and Allura steps up close beside him and slips her hand into his. He turns to face her, and she is more beautiful than a thousand stars.

"This is nice," she whispers. Something about the weight and scale of the universe, so clear and bright outside the window, makes them both speak in hushed voices.

"See? The void is not so bad," Shiro says.

"Not when I'm with you," Allura replies with a smile.

He lifts a hand to her cheek, and traces the pink mark with his thumb, and Allura does not pull away. She leans into his palm, and her eyes shimmer with the reflected light of stars.

Something shifts, and for a moment he sees her… somewhere else. Still under the cosmos, but… on the castle in the sky. Under a vaulted ceiling, stars all around her, white walls and blue lights and… He blinks, and takes a sharp breath. But it's gone. She's here, in Arandin Station. With him.

"Are you alright?" she asks.

"Yeah," he murmurs. "It's just… for a second there, I thought we were in the magic castle in the stars."

She laughs softly. "This isn't a dream, Takashi."

"Are you sure?" He strokes his thumb across her cheek again, and the mark tingles slightly against his skin. "It feels like a dream."

She leans up and brushes her nose against his.

"It's real," she whispers, and the exhale of her words brushes against his lips, warm and soft and full of promise.

He closes the distance and kisses her, and her hand reaches up into his hair and holds him close. It is tentative, at first; a gentle exploration of her lips, his fingers resting lightly against her hip. But hesitancy gives way to urgency, and he pulls her against his body and kisses her deeply, his tongue slipping into her mouth to taste her, his arm wrapped tight around her waist to hold her close. She clutches at his clothes and groans into his mouth, and the desperate sound echoes away into the starlit sky.

He pulls back to look at her, and to run his hand up into her hair and meet her wide-eyed gaze. He feels like flying. Nothing in his life has prepared him for something as magical and beautiful as this.

"See?" she says. "It's not a dream."

"I beg to differ," he says, and it makes her smile, so that when he kisses her again she tastes like mirth and joy.

## +

He walks her back to her dorm afterwards, once the overseer closes the observation deck for the night cycle. Allura holds his hand the entire way, and Shiro cannot stop looking at her. The pink crescents on her cheeks seem to glow from within. He's not sure if he's imagining it, or if it's some real, physiological response to the closeness they just shared.

They make it back to her room just before curfew kicks in, and she stops in the doorway, in the quiet corridor, to bid him goodnight.

"Thank you for taking me to the deck," she says softly.

"That's okay," Shiro says. "You want to go again some time?"

She grins up at him, and stands on her tiptoes so she can wrap her arm around his neck.

"What do you think?" she teases.

He settles his hands on her waist, and smiles at her. "I'm not sure," he says playfully. "Can you give me a hint?"

She chuckles, and presses a gentle kiss to his lips.

"Of course the answer is _yes_ ," she whispers.

They part with another kiss, and Allura opens her door and slips into her room with one final backward glance. Shiro hurries back to his dorm before curfew kicks in and the overseers catch him wandering the halls after hours. He makes it with a few minutes to spare, and flops down on his bunk.

"What are you grinning for?" Hunk asks.

"I took Allura to the observation deck," Shiro says. "It was amazing."

The evening replays in his memory: the feel of Allura in his arms, the soft way she kissed him, her hands running through his hair and clutching at his clothes… it was like a fantasy. Impossible and breath-taking and better than he could ever have imagined.

"I can tell," Hunk says. "I'm proud of you, buddy."

He knows Hunk is teasing, but he's too happy right now to care.

## +

Tonight, he dreams of the magical castle again. But this time, Allura is there, dressed in white and surrounded by stars. He takes her into his arms and kisses her, but a voice in his head tells him they are not supposed to be together.

What kind of dream is this, where he can't have her?

But then the lion roars, and the castle vanishes, and he sinks once more into nameless stars.


	2. Secrets

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so my plan with this is to post all the chapters as soon as i'm done with edits, which means roughly one a day. because i have the entire first draft done so it's just a matter of doing a read-through and polishing everything up. hence: chapter 2! already! enjoy!

It's hard to find any privacy on the space station. Shiro always knew that in theory, but after his date with Allura it suddenly becomes a very real and practical concern. Because he wants to take Allura out again. He's just not sure where.

The observation deck tends to close on the whim of the overseers, and it's not _truly_ private, despite what people do there. Shiro contemplates inviting Allura back to his room, but it feels too forward. Besides, she still hasn't properly met Hunk, and the privacy screen in the room is barely sound proof, and just… no. He needs somewhere else.

He still can't shake the feeling that he's doing something forbidden every time he talks to her, or sneaks a kiss in the hallway, or takes her to the obs deck in the evening to hold her hand under the glittering expanse of the cosmos. He's just being dramatic, clearly. Allura's friends from life systems all give him encouraging smiles whenever he sits with her for dinner, and no one on comm team has said anything. They're not breaking any rules.

But Allura still feels like something he's not allowed to have.

After a couple of weeks of snatching time alone whenever they can manage it, Shiro finds what he's looking for. He gets sent to some disused corridor to fix a broken comm relay, and it occurs to him that hardly anyone comes to this part of the station. Once the fix is done, he takes the opportunity to poke around a bit. The corridor is only short, and sealed at both ends, and most of the rooms are labs or workshops. But one room needs a code on a keypad, and when Shiro pulls off the cover and springs the lock, the door slides open to reveal the perfect hidden treasure: an old overseer's office.

Shiro glances back at the corridor. But the cameras are out in this part of the station, and he's the only living soul around. He ducks into the office and closes the door.

It's hardly luxurious. There's a desk and some sofas, and grimy cupboards full of broken tabs and implant chips. But it's secluded, and quiet, and unobserved. All it needs is a bit of tidying up. He can swipe a couple of blankets from supplies and rig the lights and the door lock and then… they can come here and not be disturbed.

He pockets the access card for the corridor; he can clone it in the comms workshop before he has to return it. Then he relocks the office and heads back.

## +

"Where are we going?" Allura asks.

Shiro holds her hand and gestures to her to be quiet, and pulls her down a side hallway and around a corner, into the antechamber of the closed-off corridor. He pulls out the access card and touches it to the reader, and the doors swing open.

"What is this?" Allura asks. "This is off-limits."

"Yeah, so no one comes here." Shiro grins at her, and tugs her hand, and she follows him down the hall and into the abandoned office. The door slides shut behind them, and Allura looks around at the cosy space.

He fixed up the lights, so that the room is lit in a soft golden glow instead of the harsh white of the work lamps. And he tidied up the mess as best he could. It's hardly a palace, but Allura's eyes light up when she takes it in.

"We're going to get in trouble," she says, but she eyes the sofas longingly. She doesn't want to leave, she's just… working herself up to staying.

"No, we won't, don't worry," Shiro says. "The cameras aren't even working down here. I only found this place because I got sent to fix a busted relay. No one comes here. I checked."

Allura lets go of his hand and sits down on the sofa. She runs her fingers over the blankets, as if getting a feel for the room.

"So why are we here?" she asks, and that familiar, irreverent spark glints in her eyes.

"You said you wanted to spend time alone," Shiro says. "And here… we really are alone. Properly."

He sits down next to her, but he keeps his hands to himself. He doesn't want her to feel trapped in this space with him, or obligated to stay if she doesn't want to. She turns her body towards him, and walks her fingers along his upper arm and up to his shoulder.

"And what are we going to do? Now that we're alone?"

"Whatever you want," he says. "We can just sit here and talk, if you like."

Her hand reaches his neck, and she runs her fingers along his jaw, and Shiro catches his breath. Allura gives him a delighted grin, and stands up.

"I have a better idea," she says.

She unzips her overalls and shrugs them off, revealing the vest and panties she wears underneath. He's never seen so much of her; never seen that expanse of rich brown skin, or the tiny pink marks that swirl on her shoulders and thighs. She reaches up and pulls her hair out of its bun. Waves of soft white tumble around her head and neck, and she shakes them out, and suddenly all Shiro wants to do is bury his hands in those curls and kiss every inch of her.

He reaches out and pulls her into his lap - into a desperate, possessive kiss. She gasps against his lips and scrabbles for his overalls so she can get him out of his clothes, and he obliges, because the thought and feel of her overwhelms him and he needs to press his body up to hers and feel the warmth of her skin beneath his hands and his mouth and his tongue.

"I knew you had an ulterior motive," she whispers.

"Can you blame me?" He kisses it against her throat, and she groans. "You're heavenly. I've never met anyone like you."

She tangles her hands into his hair and pulls up his head so she can smile at him, and the marks on her cheeks glow pinkish-white in the darkness of the room. She scatters kisses over his lips and jaw; tiny, heated gifts that make his skin tingle and his heart burst.

"I want you, Takashi," she breathes. "I want all of you."

"You can have me," he promises.

And in the soft light of this sheltered space, he gives himself to her completely.

## +

The next day, he walks down to the commissary for breakfast in a blissful daze. Hunk laughs at him, good-naturedly; he was still awake when Shiro snuck back in last night, and all he said was 'so you finally got Allura alone, huh?'. This morning, he cheerfully steers Shiro through the breakfast line as he tries to get his thoughts in order.

All he can think of is Allura - in his arms, gasping and breathless, her hands clutching at his back, her lips so soft and warm and her body glowing pink… He shakes his head. He needs to focus on the day's jobs and not drift off into a daydream, no matter how exquisite.

Allura walks in with her friends just as Shiro sits down with Hunk, and she blushes when she sees him. She gives him a tiny smile and a wave, and all her friends giggle and shush each other. Seems that word of their night together got out, at least to Allura's immediate circle. Not that Shiro cares - he'd happily tell anyone and everyone, were it not for the strange nagging feeling that he shouldn't.

She keeps looking over at him as she eats, and the smile never leaves her face.

On the way out, Shiro spots her in the crowd, and dodges through the press of people until he takes her hand. He pulls her aside into a store cupboard, and the door closes behind them.

"Hey," she says. She bites her lip, and it's too much for Shiro to take. He kisses her so fiercely and desperately that her back bumps the shelves, and she clings to him just as urgently. Only the sense of borrowed time and imminent discovery makes Shiro pull away; because otherwise, he would happily stay here in this closet and kiss her senseless all day.

Allura chuckles, and cards her hand through his hair.

"Did you miss me?" she asks.

"Always."

"I have to get to work," she says, but she makes no move to leave.

"Last night was really fun," he tells her. He rests his hands on her hips and feels the warmth of her pressed against his body, and he wants all of her, all over again. She smiles at him, and kisses him softly on the lips.

"It was," she whispers.

"Do you want to do it again tonight?"

A grin, and a nod. "Same place?"

He nods in return. "Same time?"

"Hmm… let's go a bit earlier," Allura says. "Let me have you all to myself for a little longer."

He grins delightedly, and pulls her in for another kiss; but the door opens, and they spring apart as the overseer looms in the entrance.

"You're not supposed to be in here," the Tavi says, and Allura clears her throat.

"Sorry, sir," she says. "We just had some work matters to discuss."

The overseer looks like they don't believe a word of it, but they stand aside, and Shiro ducks gratefully out of the closet and hurries off to work.

## +

At dinner, he introduces Allura to Hunk. Now that they're semi-official as a couple, it seems like the right time to bring Allura into his friend circle, such as it is. Hunk is a good place to start, since they're roommates.

"Nice to meet you, Allura," Hunk says, as they all sit down to eat. "I've heard a lot about you. Nothing but good things, obviously."

Shiro hides his blush behind his coffee cup, but Allura gives him a knowing smile. Thankfully, Hunk keeps quiet about Shiro's long-standing crush on her, so he's at least spared that embarrassment. They get to talking about more mundane matters instead.

"So how did you end up on Arandin?" Hunk asks.

"I volunteered," Allura says. "How could I not? As soon as I found out about this part of the war effort, I knew I had to come up here."

"Same here," Hunk says. "Me and Shiro were on another station together before we got transferred."

"So he told me," Allura says. "You were lucky to get moved together. I didn't know anyone when I got here."

"But you made friends, right? I see you around with the life systems crew."

"Oh, yes. Luckily life systems is very tight knit."

She talks a little about her friends in the labs, and Hunk shares some of their work stories from comms tech, and soon they're chatting away like they've known each other for years. Shiro breathes a silent sigh of relief; his life could've got a whole lot more complicated if Hunk and Allura didn't get along.

"I hear you have a special someone?" Allura says, as they finish up their coffee and the canteen starts to empty out. "Takashi tells me you're dating a Balmeran."

Hunk looks blank, and his gaze darts to Shiro's face.

"What?" he says, and the bafflement in his voice sounds genuine. "I'm not… seeing anyone."

"You're not seeing Shay anymore?" Shiro asks. Did they break up and he didn't realise? He could've sworn they were still going strong.

"Who's Shay?" Hunk asks.

Shiro's hand tightens on his coffee mug, and a knot of icy fear trickles down his spine.

"What do you mean, who's Shay?" he says. "The Balmeran? You were dating her before we got here."

"I've never met a Balmeran," Hunk says. "You tryna prank me, dude?"

Shiro stares at him, and forces himself to close his mouth and put down the coffee cup and soothe the frown from his brow.

"I must've misremembered," he mutters.

"I'm flattered that you'd make up a whole girlfriend for me," Hunk jokes. "But… maybe you should talk to Doctor Blake about that over-active imagination."

"Right," Shiro chuckles, but the levity is entirely fake. Under the table, his hands bunch into fists, but he forces himself to sit still and not panic.

He _remembers_ Shay. He didn't imagine her, or make her up. He can picture her clearly: sitting next to Hunk on a bench, under a tree with red leaves, laughing at some shared joke. Hunk met her… somewhere. Somehow. And then she visited him. When… when they were planetside?

Why can't he remember? He _knows_ she's a real person. But he can't remember exactly how she met Hunk, or when, or anything except the knowledge that they were together as a couple.

Maybe he _did_ imagine her, because Hunk clearly doesn't have any recall of a Balmeran girlfriend. But the image of her is so vivid and real in his head that he can't shake it off. Why would he make up something like that?

Allura lays a hand on his arm, and he looks over into her comforting smile.

"You alright?" she asks.

"I'm fine," he says. And he is fine. Just… confused.

Allura stands up, and picks up her tray.

"Well, it was nice to meet you, Hunk," she says. "I'll see you soon, Takashi."

This time, her smile is more of a smirk, and Shiro suddenly doesn't care about Hunk's imaginary girlfriend.

## +

Later, when Shiro drifts back to his room in a blissful, contented haze, his thoughts return once more to Shay and Hunk. He lets himself back into the dorm, and finds Hunk still awake, drinking his daily on the bed.

"So… fun night?" Hunk asks. He wiggles his eyebrows, and Shiro rolls his eyes.

"Ha ha," he says, his voice flat. He mixes up his daily and climbs up onto his bunk, opposite Hunk.

"You really don't remember Shay?" Shiro asks. He should let it go but… something about it nags at him; needles into his mind and demands answers.

"Uh… no," Hunk says. "I think I'd remember having a Balmeran girlfriend. Where did you even dream up that idea?"

"I don't know," Shiro confesses. "I have this really clear memory of her. She was sitting next to you, under a red tree."

Hunk gives him a worried look. "Seriously. Dude. Get that chip looked at."

"You think I'm going crazy."

Hunk's face softens, and he drains the last of the daily from his mug and puts it aside. He regards Shiro carefully from across the room.

"Lots of people have memory problems up here," he says. "The net messes with people's heads. But you gotta get it seen to, Shiro. You can't just leave it. What if it gets worse?"

"Alright, but… what if _you're_ the one with a memory problem?" Shiro counters. "And Shay's real, but you don't remember her. What then?"

"Ugh, seriously!" Hunk says. "If she's real, how come I don't have any holos of her? Any messages? Anything like that?"

Shiro mulls this over as he takes a sip of his drink. Hunk makes a good point. Shay must be a figment of his imagination, then, just like the strange lion in his dreams.

"I guess," he says. "Maybe I should get Blake to adjust my implant."

"Trust me, dude, it's for the best."

Hunk rolls over and leaves Shiro to finish his daily, and soon his soft snoring fills the bedroom. Shiro drains his mug, and rolls the empty cup between his hands, over and over.

He must have just… imagined Shay, then. He can't think of any other explanation for it. But he hates the feeling that he can't trust his own mind. He can _see_ her, so clearly and completely, and the knowledge that she never existed just won't mesh with that memory. He can even hear her _voice_ , for crying out loud. How can he have summoned up a whole person in his head? And why?

Hunk's right. He should talk to Doctor Blake about it. He's just not sure if he wants to.

## +

He sees Allura every night, in the secret office room, hidden away from prying eyes. He's still concerned about the strange memories, but when he's with Allura the worry melts away. Every night, he thinks perhaps she'll ask for more space, or tell him she can't see him anymore. But every night, she greets him with obvious delight; she pulls him eagerly to her, runs her hands over his body and into the messed-up tufts of his hair, kisses him deep and desperate. It feels too good to be true. After weeks of longing and watching her from afar, she is finally his, and he marvels at the way they fit together so easily and sweetly.

During the day, he sneaks into her lab to see her sometimes; the catch a few precious moments with her whenever he can. She shows him the huge trellises covered in vines, and the ecosystems in their clear panels, and the sun lamps that imitate the warm glow of a homely star. They eat dinner together every night - sometimes joined by Hunk, and sometimes alone - and then they meet up again during leisure hours to run off to their own private room.

It becomes harder and harder to leave that place, and Shiro arrives back to his dorm after curfew on more than one occasion, risking a run-in with the overseers for the sake of spending as much time with Allura as possible. It is more than just the physical release of making love to her. They lie together, afterwards, wrapped in the blankets, talking softly and making each other laugh with silly jokes or teasing. He runs his hands through the silvery cloud of her hair and cradles her against his chest and it feels… perfect. Then he tears himself away, and goes back to his room and to Hunk's snoring, and everything feels off-kilter, somehow.

He's caught strangely double-minded. On the one hand, being with Allura feels so completely right that it leaves him breathless. And yet… he can't shake that bothersome, nagging feeling that they're doing something wrong.

The feeling arises most strongly in Shiro's dreams, when he collapses into his bunk and falls asleep with thoughts of Allura still running through his head. In his dreams, the sense of wrongness grows steadier and more insistent. He finds himself in that magical castle, drifting through unknown constellations, and Allura is always there dressed in white… and when he reaches for her, she pulls back and tells him this cannot be.

It's bizarre. He comes to bed elated, riding the high of holding Allura close and feeling her arms around him. But the joy of evening always gives way to the disquiet of the night time, and he wakes up in a cloud of anxious uncertainty.

Maybe it's guilt. Maybe it's paranoia, and he should just ignore it. But that feeling of wrongness is so powerful, so visceral, that he can't quite shake it. Except when Allura is around, and everything feels right.

## +

He keeps dreaming of the lion who lives in the castle.

It becomes a nightly occurrence - more common even than dreams of Allura. Sometimes it begins in the castle, and he walks through towering hallways, under arches and blue lights, trying to find the lion. Sometimes, he drops straight onto the empty plain beneath the stars, and the lion waits for him, looming impossibly huge above him.

He gets the impression that she is trying to tell him something; but she speaks in some strange, voiceless manner, he can't understand her. Then he wakes up, and the visions fade, and whatever message she tried to impart vanishes like smoke.

Tonight, he dreams of the castle more vividly than he has ever done before. Allura is there; oddly reserved, holding herself back, her eyes clouded with sadness.

"Get to your lions," she says, and he obeys.

The lion roars, somewhere in the depths of the castle. Shiro follows the sound - follows that irresistible pull on his soul - and finds her in a vast hangar, haloed in blue light. But as he walks towards her, the room melts away; the sky darkens, the stars wink into life above him, and he finds himself on that eerie, ethereal plain.

"What do you want?" he asks the lion. It's the first time he's ever tried to talk to her directly, but this particular dream feels so vivid and real that he manages to get the words out.

She rumbles ahead of him, calling to him without words, and lowers her head. He places a hand on her nose, and looks up into those golden eyes.

"Tell me what you want," he whispers.

She wants - _him, in her cockpit, his hands on her controls, power thrumming beneath him - and he calls out orders, calls out commands - wind rushes over the lion, and he_ feels _it, feels what it is to be a giant beast of metal and magic - a weapon in his hand that slots into her console, binding them together - Allura's voice in his ear, in his comms - Hunk's too, somehow, and others he doesn't recognise - stars - planets - the castle lit up from within - the burst of cannon fire, the heat of explosions, the shaking of the lion beneath him as she rolls and dives and swerves through the void - lions roaring, more than one, more than just his - bright golden eyes that fill his vision, drown him, draw him in and embrace him and --_

He wakes up with a gasp, panting for breath, drenched in sweat. The implant burns into the back of his neck, and he cries out as pain stabs through him. His head pounds and his vision blurs, and he clutches at the chip and wills the agony to subside.

The pain dies down, and he explores the chip with tentative fingers. It doesn't feel hot to the touch; maybe the heat was purely his imagination.

Is it supposed to hurt like this? Doctor Blake said the implant protects them from the worst effects of the radiation, so maybe that's what just happened. It overloaded somehow in response to some threat. Fragments of the dream come back to him, and he rubs at his temples. He needs a drink, and a walk.

He gets up and goes to the washroom and splashes cold water on his face, and then pads back into his dorm and gets a glass of water from the tap. The dim lights just barely illuminate the shape of the furniture, and Shiro sags into a chair and stares into the gloom.

It was just a dream, he tells himself. But it feels like more than that. There's weight and substance behind it, as if these nightly visions are a window onto some other life. Maybe it's a future that still waits for him, and he's being sent premonitions of his own fate. Or maybe it's another life he lived before, in the distant past.

Hunk stirs and rolls over in his bunk, and blinks blearily down at Shiro in the gloom.

"What are you doing up?" he mumbles.

"I had a weird dream," Shiro says. "Go back to sleep."

"What was it about?"

He hesitates. But he can trust Hunk. And he feels the urge to tell someone, if only to try and make sense of it.

"I have it every night," he says softly. "I was in a magic castle, and there were lions. And one of the lions tried to talk to me, and I saw--" _what?_ What did he see, exactly? A blur of shapes and noises and sensations, and nothing he can pin down with a description or an explanation.

"Was the castle all white and blue?" Hunk asks.

Shiro's eyes snap to him, and he stands up and grips the edge of Hunk's bed.

"You had the same dream?" he asks.

"Well, yeah. A couple of times," Hunk mumbles. "There's a lion, right? A yellow lion?"

"Mine was black," Shiro says. "But the castle… it's magical? And it's in… space. Somewhere."

He trails off, because it sounds silly, but Hunk gives him a drowsy nod.

"Yeah, that's the place. Doctor Blake said it sounded like a training sim we did, and it probably got sublimated in the memory consolidation treatment, but the subconscious memories remain. Or something."

That sounds like something Blake would say: a reasonable, sensible explanation, wrapped up in a lot of technical words. So maybe that's all it is, then. A simulation he doesn't fully remember, seeping into his sleeping thoughts. But also…

"You told Doctor Blake about the dream?" Shiro asks.

"Yeah," Hunk says. "She asked if I had any recurring dreams and I told her, and then she tweaked my chip. And now I don't have them anymore."

"Oh." It's about all Shiro can manage. Hunk had the same dream, too. And so did Allura. Does it mean something? Is it important? Or just a coincidence?

"You should tell Blake," Hunk mumbles, as he curls up in his bed again. "Especially if they're waking you up."

He _should_ tell Blake. She's there to help, after all, and he's supposed to tell her this kind of thing. _Mental disturbances_ , and all that. This definitely qualifies. He has his weekly check-in tomorrow; he can tell her about them, and she can adjust his implant, and then the dreams will stop and he can get a peaceful night's sleep.

But he cannot shake the bone-deep conviction that the dreams are important. That they _mean_ something.

Maybe he'll just… see how it goes. No need to tell Blake just yet. Maybe he can figure this out on his own.

## +

Doctor Blake greets him warmly as usual when he goes in for his check-up the next day. He crosses her lab to the med bay and sits on the gurney, and she pulls down the collar of his jumpsuit and attaches the connectors to his implant. The monitor beside him flickers, and his vitals scroll across the screen.

"And how have you been this week, Shiro?" she asks jovially. "Feeling well?"

"Yeah, I'm fine," he says.

"Good, good," she mutters absently. She scrolls through the read-outs, and her face pulls into a frown; the fringes above her eyes elongate and stick up, and her brows knit together.

"You've been sexually active since I last saw you," she says.

Shiro tenses up, his heart racing. How can she _possibly_ know that? How much does the chip monitor, exactly? He did nothing wrong, surely - there's no rules against relationships. He can sleep with whoever he wants, can't he?

"Yeah. A few times," he says, as casually and noncommittally as he can manage.

Doctor Blake looks up at him. Her plumes fan out around her face, and her eyes suddenly look brighter and more threatening than Shiro has ever seen them. He sways back a little on the bed, and his fingers dig into the metal of the gurney.

"You should have told me about this," Blake says smoothly - but the tension in her face gives away the true depth of her feelings. If Shiro had to guess, he'd say she's furious.

"Did I do something wrong?" he asks.

Blake clasps her hands together, and the plumes subside - as if she is making the conscious effort to appear calm and unruffled.

"Of course not," she says. "Relationships are allowed. Within reasonable bounds. Who were you with?"

Shiro frowns at her. The ruffled feathers - the glint in her eyes - it's all gone now, smoothed away beneath a veneer of composure, but the memory of it sticks in his mind. The tension won't leave his body; the adrenaline surges through his blood stream. Something's wrong, here. Something is very deeply wrong.

"Does it matter?" he asks. "It's none of your business."

The calm and composed expression does not leave Blake's face, but the spines around her neck rise up again.

"It's important for me to know about your sexual partners," she says. "That sort of information can help us track vectors of disease, and plan team dynamics…"

"What disease?" Shiro demands. "I have my implant. I drink my dailies. I don't _have_ any diseases. What does it matter who I'm with?"

"You can trust me, Shiro," Blake says soothingly.

But he doesn't. He has no idea why, but he doesn't trust her at all.

"It's not about trust," he says. "You don't need to know."

The frills come up, all at once; thick and spiny, framing Doctor Blake's face and her bright blue eyes. She huffs out a breath through her nose, but Shiro meets her gaze and doesn't blink. He won't tell her. He won't risk Allura getting into trouble. Blake turns away from him, and taps a few commands onto the screen. A red button option appears on the display, blinking rapidly, and she gives him a glare filled with pure hatred as she presses one clawed finger to the monitor.

A jolt of pain runs through his neck from the implant, and Shiro yells out in surprise. After the pain comes a wave of cold, radiating out from the chip, and his ears ring as the cold reaches his skull and his head and his brain…

The ringing stops, but the chill remains, and Shiro blinks and tries to get his bearings. He's still in the lab, but everything feels… distant and muffled and blurred, as if it's not real. Blake's eyes bore into him, a frozen and unforgiving blue, and he tries to move his limbs but they're slow and sluggish to respond.

"Tell me where you are, Shiro," Blake commands.

Well, he's not answering that. Whatever she's just done to his--

"In the med lab in Arandin Station," he says.

The words come out of their own accord, without his consent. He wanted to hold them back - out of defiance, if nothing else - but they're out there. He said them.

"What were your jobs today?" Blake asks.

He reels them off immediately, whilst his subconscious screams at him to shut the fuck up. But he can't. Blake did something to his chip, and now she's asking him questions and he's answering them, even though he doesn't want to. She overrode his brain, somehow, and now he has no control.

Twisting, noxious panic grips him, and his hands tighten into fists.

"Very good, Shiro," Blake says. "Now tell me: with whom were you sexually active this last week?"

_Don't say it don't say it don't say her name don't give her away don't say it--_

"Allura Melnori, from life systems."

Blake's eyes go wide, for a split second, before she flattens out the expression and clasps her hands again.

"And now tell me the truth," she says, her voice like ice. "Have you had any dreams? Any intrusive thoughts at all?"

He screws up his face and flinches away from her, but she holds up a hand.

"Stay still," she commands. "Answer my question."

And he doesn't want to - he wants to say nothing, stay silent, keep his thoughts and hopes and dreams a secret - but the words are dragged out of him anyway, by the cold hand of the implant, and whatever Blake did to it.

"I dreamed about a castle in the sky," he says, and his voice sounds flat and dead to his own ears. "I dreamed about a lion."

"Those kinds of dreams are very dangerous, Shiro," Blake says. "I'm going to adjust your implant so you won't have them again. And I will be speaking to Melnori as well about your… relationship."

In the buried corners of his mind, a frantic voice screams at him; but his consciousness is rimed in ice and frost and his thoughts are sluggish and his body won't respond to anything he asks of it. Blake taps a few more commands into the monitor, and another stab of pain blossoms in the back of his neck.

"You will tell me at once if you have any more of these dreams," Blake commands. "Do you understand?"

"I understand," he says. Of course he will tell her. He'll tell her everything. Why wouldn't he? He trusts her, and she is his doctor, and whatever she says is for the best.

Blake smiles an ugly, icy smile. "Very good, Shiro. You will remember only that we talked, and I adjusted your implant to help with some nightmares."

She taps a few buttons on the screen, and the wave of cold overpowers all of Shiro's senses, and everything goes white.

## +

Shiro walks out of Doctor Blake's lab in a cheery mood. She finally tweaked his chip, after weeks of nightmares, so he'll actually be able to get a good night's sleep. And he's completely well, and nothing is wrong. Everything is great.

Some nagging inner voice insists he should be outraged and worried about… something. He ignores it. He can trust Doctor Blake, and she said he's perfectly fine, so there's nothing to worry about.

When he gets to the canteen, he sits next to Hunk and waits for Allura to join them. She walks in a few minutes later with her friends, but when he catches her eye she frowns and looks away. Tension hangs over her whole body - in the hunch of her shoulders, and the way her knuckles tighten on her tray. Something's wrong.

Shiro gets up on instinct, and crosses to her side just as she turns away from the line with her meal in her hands.

"Allura," he says softly. "What's the matter?"

She frowns at him, and her eyes dart around the room.

"Not here," she says, in a tiny, terrified voice. "Meet me later?"

He nods, too confused for words, and lets her go. She hurries across the room with her head down, and sits in the corner with her friends.

She doesn't look at him for the rest of dinner.

## +

Anxiety and confusion rob Shiro of his appetite, and he leaves half his dinner on the tray. When Hunk goes off to spend his leisure time in the games room, Shiro races down to the corridor where he normally meets Allura. Then he stands there fretting, waiting for her to turn up.

She emerges eventually, looking just as small and subdued by apprehension as she did in the canteen. He takes her hand and leads her into the closed-off corridor, and the office space they have made their own.

"What happened?" he asks. "What's wrong?"

She stands there in the soft lights and stares up at him, and her hands twist together, over and over.

"Did you tell Doctor Blake about us?" she asks.

"What? No!" he exclaims. "Of course not. Why would I tell her?"

"Well, she knows," Allura says. Tears prick her eyes, but she blinks them back and keeps going. "She called me into her office and gave me a huge lecture about 'inappropriate relationships'. Apparently I was up for a promotion but now it won't happen? Because I'm 'getting a reputation' or something."

"What does that even mean? I didn't say anything to her!"

"Well, how else would she know?" Allura snaps. She looks away from him and wipes at her eyes, and he reaches for her arms but she pulls back.

"I swear, I didn't say anything," Shiro protests. "She asked me about it but I told her… I told her…"

He trails off. He vaguely recalls an argument with Doctor Blake about who he'd been seeing, and then walking out of her lab, but… there's nothing in between. Just a blank space in his head.

"What?" Allura asks. "What did you tell her?"

"I said it was none of her business."

She looks at him like she wants to trust him, and the marks on her cheeks glow a faint white; a physiological response to strong emotion. Whether it's fear or anger or sadness, he can't tell. He reaches for her arms to pull her closer and soothe some of the worry from her eyes, and as he does so her hand brushes the closed panel on the inside of his right wrist.

A jolt runs up his arm, like an electric shock in slow motion, shivering up his forearm and elbow and bicep. A sharp spike of pain hits him, right where the implant is embedded in his neck, and he flinches. Bright spots flicker in his vision, and his ears ring. He sinks onto the sofa and clutches at his temples and wills the odd, uncomfortable feeling to subside.

Allura's face appears in front of him, and the world comes back into focus. She holds his hands tight, fingers wrapped around his, her eyes soft with concern even though she was mad at him less than a minute ago.

_God, what did he do to deserve her?_

"Are you alright?" she asks. "What happened?"

He shakes his head. But the pain dislodged something in his mind - like a cover being shaken loose. Memories come flooding back to him; a tumult of scraps and pieces, all jumbled up together. Blake - her eyes boring into him - discomfort and icy cold, inside his skull - and questions he had to answer, even though he didn't want to.

"Doctor Blake did something to my implant." He shudders, and tries to sort through the mess in his mind. "I wouldn't tell her who I'd been with. So she did something to the chip, and then… when she asked me questions, I had to answer. I couldn't control it."

"That's not possible," Allura breathes. "How could she…?"

"I don't know." Shiro looks up into her eyes, and runs his thumbs over her knuckles, where her hands rest in his. "You have to believe me. I wasn't going to tell Blake anything, I swear. But somehow she forced me to admit it."

More faint images surface in his mind, and he groans.

"She asked me about the dreams," he says. "I had to tell her. And then she did something to my chip so I wouldn't have them again."

"Your lion dreams?" Allura asks.

He nods. "I swear I wasn't going to tell her. Allura… I wouldn't…"

"I believe you," she says softly. She gets up and sits next to him on the sofa, and he turns to face her. He wants to keep holding her hand; keep that thread of contact, because right now it feels like the only thing tethering him to reality.

"Why would Blake do something like this?" she says. "She's a doctor. She's supposed to look after us. And the chips aren't supposed to work like that."

"I don't know," Shiro says. "Somehow… she made me answer any question. And then she made me forget all about it."

Allura stares at him, her eyes searching his face, and then she sinks into his embrace. He wraps his arm around her shoulder and she pulls herself tight against his body, her face pressed to his chest.

"I'm scared," she whispers.

"Me too," Shiro admits. "I didn't even know a chip could do that."

"She told me I shouldn't see you again," Allura says, her voice small and quiet. "She said I was ruining my career. What if she finds out we're here? What if she punishes me somehow?"

Shiro's arms tighten around her out of an impulsive need to keep her close. He frowns into her hair. He has to at least give her the option of calling this off.

"Do you want us to stop seeing each other?" he asks.

She pulls back from the hug and meets his gaze.

"No, of course not," she says. "I just…"

"We can stop," Shiro says. "If you don't want to get in trouble. If Blake is going to make your life miserable. You don't have to take that kind of risk for me."

"Takashi…" She places a hand on his jaw, and he leans into the touch. "I don't want to stop. It's just that… Blake really scares me. I think we need to be more careful."

A weight lifts off his chest, and he runs his fingers through Allura's hair.

"Okay. Well… we can stop eating dinner together, I suppose."

"I think we should only see each other here," she says. "No one knows about this place. In the rest of the station, we have to pretend we're not together. But we can meet here every night."

"You'd do that?" Shiro asks. "Sneak around in secret? It's risky."

"I know." She smiles at him, and traces the shape of his jaw with her finger. "But I really like you. And I like _this_. I don't want to stop."

"I don't want to stop either."

"Then don't," she whispers, and he puts aside his worry and kisses her, and in the warm light of this secret room, it feels like everything will work out.

## +

After that, they stop eating their meals together, or sitting together in the canteen. Or seeing each other at all, except in the privacy of their forgotten corridor, away from cameras and overseers. Allura goes back to taking her dinner with her friends; Shiro goes back to sitting with Hunk. It works, for the most part.

But the gnawing ache of worry will not leave Shiro be. It settles in the pit of his stomach, always scratching at the edge of consciousness. He can't make sense of why Doctor Blake would disapprove of their relationship; or why she even cares so much about it in the first place.

Blake will find out that he has been spending time with Allura, in defiance of her orders that they should stay away from each other. If she could tell at his last check-up that he'd been intimate with someone, she can tell at the next one too - and then she will ask who he was with. Can he lie? Pretend it was someone else? What if she does that weird override thing again and forces the answer out of him?

He doesn't mind getting into trouble. But he doesn't want to drag Allura down with him. There's no way of knowing what will happen once Blake finds out they're still together, and speculation on that front keeps him up at night.

In the midst of all his anxiety, his nightly time with Allura remains a brief, perfect haven of calm. She kisses him, and his concerns melt away; she drags her hands over his heated skin and he cannot think of anything but the need to be with her. It is the only part of his day that makes sense. Everything else feels muddled and wrong - twisted up into strange shapes, clouded by uncertainty - but here, in the abandoned office that has become their secret hideout, everything feels perfect and right. He might not be able to trust his own thoughts or memories, but he can trust Allura, and the way she melts into his embrace whenever they are together. Her touch grounds him in himself, and he doesn't want to give that up.

Which means he needs to do something about the implant.

He's thought about all the options, and this is the only one that gives him a chance of keeping Allura in his life. The implant is the key. Blake knew about his meetings with Allura because of something the chip monitored; she was able to override his willpower using some function buried in the chip's code. The only way to fool Blake is to fool the chip, and that means he needs to get it out and take a look at it.

## +

He broaches the subject with Hunk gradually. At first, he simply tells Hunk what happened in Blake's lab. Hunk takes the news quietly, and Shiro sits patiently and gives him time to process it.

They are sitting on their bunks drinking their dailies, and Shiro swirls the liquid around in his mug as he waits for Hunk to get the weight and measure of what he's just told him. The dailies used to seem so innocuous. Just a mix of vitamins and minerals and nutrients, tailored precisely to his body's needs by the doctor. Now, he wonders what else might be lurking in the innocent-looking capsules.

"She made you do exactly as she said?" Hunk asks.

Shiro nods slowly, and doesn't say anything as Hunk takes another sip of his drink and mulls this over some more.

"So she could do that to any of us," he goes on. "She could make us answer any question."

"Exactly," Shiro says. "We can't keep secrets from her, because she can force them out of us. And what kind of chip allows that sort of control, anyway? It's supposed to be a health implant. It's supposed to protect us."

"I dunno, dude," Hunk says. "This all seems so dystopian. What could she possibly gain from it?"

"I don't know. But for some reason she warned Allura to stay away from me. And I'd really like to know why."

He sets his unfinished daily down on the ledge, half the liquid still in the mug, and leaves it there to go cold.

## +

He does not dream of the lion or the castle again, after Doctor Blake's interference with his chip. Sometimes his slumber throws up images of golden eyes, or vague impressions of white walls and lofty ceilings - but the vivid, narrative dreams do not return. He does not walk through magical hallways, or converse with huge metal lions under impossible stars.

Instead, he dreams of a planet - blue and green, painted in white scraps of cloud - and heat and sunlight and the crunch of sand under his boots. He dreams of the stars, wheeling gently outside a metal capsule - a ship of some sort, that carries him to the edge of known space. Sometimes, his mind conjures nightmares about a prison, and terrifying monsters that do battle with him, like creatures of myth. But the castle does not return. The lion remains elusive.

Maybe it doesn't matter. It was just a dream, anyway. But it was a dream that Hunk had too, and Allura; it was a dream that felt deeply, powerfully real. Somewhere out there in the universe, something or someone is trying to reach him. He can't explain how or why he knows that, just that he's sure of it. The dreams were a message, and now he's cut off from that signal, and he longs to know who is reaching out to him, and why.

One night, he tells Allura that Hunk also shared the dream about the castle and the lions.

"Well, that proves it then," she says. "It must have been some video or story or something, and you just don't remember watching it."

She lies on the sofa with him, her head resting on his bare chest, and he runs a hand through her hair and holds her close to his body. She skims idle lines on his skin and traces his scars with her fingers. Quite where he got so many, he doesn't really remember. Maybe in the accident?

"Don't you think it's odd that he dreamed it too?" he asks. "Apparently Doctor Blake claimed it was a simulation exercise, but I don't trust her."

Allura stirs, and sits up. She pulls her hair to one side and regards him thoughtfully.

"What does it matter?" she asks. "It's a dream. It can't possibly be real."

"But what if it is?"

"Ugh." Allura rolls her eyes at him, and gets up to find her clothes. Shiro watches her retrieve her vest and panties. He's painfully aware that he has killed the mood of the evening, but he trusts Allura. He values her opinion on stuff like this.

"I mean it," he says. "Every time I had that dream it felt like… some echo of real events. The black lion was trying to give me a message. And now the dreams have stopped. All because Blake messed with my implant."

Allura pauses in her re-dressing, and studies his face. She crosses to his side and sits next to him, and reaches for his hand.

"You're serious, aren't you?" she says softly.

Shiro nods. "I know I sound crazy, but those dreams felt like… memories. Or visions of the future. Like someone was telling me what was going to happen. I need to find out what they meant."

"Blake didn't want you to have them," Allura says. "Do you think she knows what they mean?"

"I don't know. But the only way I'm going to get answers is by taking out my implant."

Allura's eyes go wide, and she clutches at his arm.

"Takashi, no," she pleads. "It's not safe. These implants protect us. You could get sick. You could lose all your memories."

"I already can't trust my own mind," Shiro points out. "How can I trust this chip? I remember a Balmeran called Shay, and Hunk doesn't. I had a check-up with Blake and she made me forget everything that happened. This implant controls us! We don't know what else it does. They tell us it's safe, but what if it's not?"

Allura shakes her head. She takes his hand, and he lifts her knuckles to his lips and kisses the back of her palm. The gesture makes her smile, but anxiety still clouds her eyes.

"I don't like this," she whispers. "What if something happens?"

"Trust me," Shiro says. "If I can get it off I can figure out what this is all about. I can work out what the dreams mean. Maybe even find a way to fool Blake so we can keep seeing each other."

Allura pulls him into a hug, and sighs into his shoulder.

"Promise me you'll be careful," she whispers, and Shiro holds her close and nods.

"I promise," he whispers back.

## +

That night, when he gets back to the dorms, Shiro sits up late and watches the stars through the tiny square window near his bunk. He runs his hand up and down his prosthetic, feeling the faint hum of the machinery and the smoothness of the panes.

His fingers catch on the panel on the wrist.

Blake told him not to mess with his arm. But Blake is not to be trusted.

He roots through his desk and finds a tool to pry the panel open. With some wrangling, he gets the metal cover loose and levers it away. It parts from the prosthetic with a click, and Shiro examines the compartment underneath.

A fragment of crystal rests in his wrist, glowing a delicate blue-white, the light rising and falling exactly like a pulse. He stares at it for a long time.

It feels so frustratingly _familiar_ \- like something he has seen time and time again. But he can't place it. He flexes his metal fingers, and watches the glow of the crystal rise and fall, and tries desperately to remember a time when he had the arm open like this, or when he might have seen this glimmering gemstone.

Nothing comes back to him; no merciful recollection to ease his mind and reassure him that he's not going mad. He sighs and flicks the panel closed, and takes the prosthetic off so he can get into bed.

A crystal in his wrist that glows blue. He gets the impression that the gem is some kind of power source, but how does that work? Arandin station has nothing like that. Was it from the station before? Where he had his accident?

Why can't he remember?

Why can't he remember any of it?


	3. Origins

Preparing to remove his chip involves some careful and discreet planning. Step one: steal a detacher and an emulator from the labs. Step two: somehow cajole Hunk into helping him. Step three: pry the implant out of its housing on the back of his neck, and see what secrets it holds. The best time to try it will be the hour or so after dinner, before the time when he normally meets Allura in the office - it's leisure hours, and there's a lot of people coming and going, and he can sneak back to the room with Hunk without arousing any suspicions.

Hunk takes some convincing on the plan, but Shiro tempts him with the promise that he can get his hands on the chip and figure out how it works. Eventually, curiosity gets the better of Hunk's natural caution, and he agrees to snag an emulator dock from the comm labs so that they can mount and clone the implant. Shiro pockets a detacher from the workshop, on a busy day when no one will notice, and hides it in the dorm under his mattress. Hunk devotes a whole evening to rigging the emulator dock to the computer in their room, and making sure the set-up can host the chip without it shorting out or shutting down.

From there, it's just a matter of picking a good time to try it out.

"I just want to take it out for a few minutes, the first time," Shiro says. "Take it out, emulate it, clone the code, then put it back in. I just want to see what happens."

"I can use your old med data to programme the emulator software," Hunk says. "So when we put the chip in the dock, it should still give readings. That way you won't get massive gaps in your medical data."

Shiro nods. The major reason he needs the emulator is because all the medical data from the chips are timestamped: if it shuts down for too long, or he takes it out for an hour, the lack of readings will show up as a huge blank in his file, and Blake will figure out what he's up to. But if he can get this rig working, then he can take out the chip whenever he wants - for his evening meetings with Allura, or overnight so he can dream freely - and let the computer fill in the gaps with fake information. It's like looping the footage on a security camera; it's far less suspicious than a blank feed.

"So can we try it out? Tomorrow night?" Shiro asks.

Hunk looks apprehensive. "Well… I could do with running a few more tests? And I'm not sure about the algorithm…"

"Hunk," Shiro cuts him off, before he talks himself out of the plan completely. "It doesn't need to be perfect. I just want to take the implant out for a few minutes to see what happens. We can do it tomorrow, after dinner. Right?"

"I… guess. We can give it a go."

Shiro helps him hide the parts of the rig around the room, in boxes and on shelves, and they make their dailies and get into bed. Shiro stares out at the stars, and wonders if there's a magical castle out there somewhere. Or a lion made of metal, trying to reach him across the unimaginable stretches of the void.

## +

The next day, he forces himself to stay calm and not fidget constantly. But it's hard. He longs to try out the emulator rig they built, and he's itching to get the implant out of his neck and see what happens. Hunk, on the other hand, is a bundle of nerves - about being caught, about potential nasty side-effects, about anything and nothing.

Shiro made Hunk promise they wouldn't talk about the chip or the plan outside of their room, _ever_ , and so they spend a silent, nervy dinner in the canteen, eating as quickly as they can without drawing attention to themselves. Allura sometimes looks up from her table; she knows that Shiro plans to try taking off the chip tonight, and she picks at her food and shoots him worried glances as the meal goes on.

It occurs to Shiro that he's more relaxed about this whole plan than either of them. Perhaps it's because he's the one taking the risk, and he's going in with his eyes open. Maybe he should be afraid, but his nerves are mostly due to impatience. He wants this thing _off_. It's doing something to his mind, and he doesn't like it. He's going to get to the bottom of this - the strange dreams, the override function - all of it. Blake can go float herself out of an airlock for all he cares. And once he gets control of this implant, he'll tell her that to her face.

He walks past Allura's table on his way out, Hunk trailing in his wake, and although he doesn't dare stop and speak to her, he holds her gaze and gives her a tiny smile. In truth, he wishes she could come with him for this; but it's too risky. They can't be seen together, even in public areas - they _certainly_ can't be caught hanging out in each other's rooms. He tells himself he'll see her again soon, and ducks out of the canteen and into the hall.

## +

Shiro strolls back to the room as nonchalantly as he can manage, Hunk following after him, and they get inside and shut the door. Hunk heaves a sigh of relief, and pulls out the kit they stashed the night before. The rig assembly takes shape on the desk: the computer and monitor; the emulator dock, with the coupling for the implant; and Hunk's code, scrolling across the screen.

"Okay, it's all ready," Hunk says. "Are you sure about this, Shiro?"

He nods. "I have to try this. I promise if anything goes wrong I'll put it straight back in."

"I dunno, man." Hunk fidgets with the detacher, and puffs out a breath. "What if you lose all your memories? Or go crazy? What if…"

"Nothing like that is going to happen," Shiro says. "It'll only be off my neck for five minutes. Let's just give it a try, okay? I want to see what happens."

"Okay," Hunk says. He shakes his head, but makes no further complaint. "Sit down, then."

Shiro sits in the chair, in front of the assembly on his desk, and tugs down his collar so that Hunk can get to the implant on his neck. Hunk clears his throat and mutters some encouraging words to himself, and then he sets the detacher to Shiro's implant.

It's an odd feeling, to have Hunk levering away at the attachments at his nape. The detacher scrapes against his skin as Hunk pries the protruding body of the implant loose. Shivers of pain run away through his neck and head, and Shiro grits his teeth against the unpleasant feeling.

"Alright, almost got it," Hunk says. "Lemme just… there."

The implant pops out with a click.

The whole world goes black.

Pain rolls over him in great heaving waves, and Shiro doubles over in agony, yelling out and clutching at his head. Hunk's worried voice echoes back to him from lightyears away, and his skull feels like it might burst. With the pain comes a barrage of images and feelings and sensations, tumbling over each other, barrelling into his mind like a stampede - too many, all at once, too much to make sense of or sort out.

_Memories_. They're memories, locked away in his brain and now… cut loose.

The pain recedes and he opens bleary eyes, breathing rapidly, his vision still blurred and hazy. His prosthetic swims into focus in front of him. He got it in an accident on--

No.

There was no accident. That memory is false - planted in his head somehow by the implant.

_Earth. And Kerberos, and a mission gone wrong. Prison cells and a gladiator arena and a witch who cut his arm off and replaced it with a weapon, so he could fight monsters…_

"Shiro? Buddy? You okay?" Hunk sounds worried, but then Hunk always sounds worried. Ever since--

_Earth. They were on Earth together._

And

_Lions. And Voltron - not a space station but a robot, a weapon, a tool in the war against the Galra, and he flies a Lion._ It comes back to him, pouring over him, drowning him in memories he can't articulate.

The arm. Focus on the arm.

Allura made it for him. On

_\--the castle in the stars. The magic castle. It's real. It's a ship and they all live there, and she sat in a workshop on that ship and made a new prosthetic for him. She put the crystal from her tiara into the wrist, to power it; a gift, to help him be more than just the gladiator the Galra wanted him to be._

She made it for him, and it's attuned to her… magic? Energy? The blue glow always got brighter when she was around… The details blur and shift as he tries to get a hold on them. How is he here, now? Why are they on this station, orbiting a strange planet, instead of in the Castle that has become home away from home?

"You don't look so good," Hunk says. "I'm putting it back in."

Shiro's arm snaps out, and without looking he grabs Hunk around the wrist.

"No," he grinds out through gritted teeth. "Hunk - don't. We're not supposed to be here."

"What are you talking about?"

What _is_ he talking about? The memories swirl past and he grabs at them; holds them, tries to piece them together into something coherent.

_A mission. They were on a mission._

That scrap of information solidifies in his mind and he clings to it like a life raft. He looks up at Hunk's terrified face, and another memory cannons into him: he brought Hunk on the mission. Hunk and… Allura.

_The Tavi have advanced technology, including the planetary shield, and Allura suggested a diplomatic mission to bring them into the Voltron Alliance. She led the mission, of course, but Shiro brought Hunk along too because behind his personable appearance, he's remarkably astute and observant. And they flew out here in the Black Lion to land on Heliana and negotiate with--_

\--a Tavi male with blue and green plumes on his head. Shiro remembers him clearly - a mean, calculating face and something distinctly off about him and--

_He's the Defence Minister. He offered to take them up to the space stations, to see how the shield is run and maintained, and they flew up here in a shuttle from the surface. He gave them the grand tour._ And then… then what?

Shiro lets go of Hunk's arm and buries his face in his hands and wills his brain to cooperate with him.

"We came here on a mission," he says. "We didn't transfer from another station."

"Shiro, you're scaring me," Hunk says, but his voice sounds far away.

What happened? What next? What…

He remembers--

_\--an argument. On the space station. The Defence Minister showing them around, and the dawning realisation that the crew are not volunteers. The implants on their necks suppress their memories and give them new ones - false ones - so that they all think they're here willingly. To aid the war effort. But there is nothing willing about it._

"We didn't volunteer to be here," Shiro says. "This is a prison."

"What? No way!" Hunk protests. "Shiro, man. Come on. You're getting paranoid. Let me put your chip back in and--"

"No!" he snaps. He surges up from the chair and lunges for Hunk, and Hunk yells out in surprise as he goes over. But he has to get Hunk's implant out. He has to make him remember.

He grabs Hunk's arm and twists it behind his back. Hunk kicks out, instinctively, and yells at him to let go - but Shiro's stronger and he knows what he's doing and Hunk doesn't remember that they used to train together, or how to break out of an armlock. He gets them both onto the floor and presses a knee to Hunk's back and holds him there.

"Stay still!" he yells. "Hunk… Let me take out your implant. Let me--"

"Oh God, no, man, come on--" Hunk pleads. Shiro ignores him. If he can just get the chip out of his neck he'll remember, and then they can figure out what the fuck to do next.

The prosthetic. The crystal. It's powered by quintessence, and Allura taught him how to summon the pure, silvery energy and let it flow through his hand. He concentrates and reaches for that power, and the arm lights up blue-white. He grabs the implant in the back of Hunk's neck; a shower of sparks flies up, and the metal crackles under his fingertips as the energy overloads it, and then he wrenches the chip out of Hunk's neck and flings it onto the desk.

Hunk yells and curls up, instinctively. Shiro releases his arm and gets off his back, slowly, but Hunk shows no signs of resistance. Not anymore.

"Hunk," Shiro says softly. "Buddy. You with me?"

"Shiro?" Hunk groans.

He rolls over, and stares up at Shiro with a wide-eyed expression. He breathes rapidly, one hand on his neck, and pushes himself upright.

"Oh no," Hunk says. "Oh no. No, no - oh, this isn't good. This isn't good!"

Shiro grabs his shoulders and shakes him.

"Hunk! Come on, talk to me. What do you remember?"

"Voltron…" Hunk clutches his forehead, and grimaces. "Voltron. The Lions… oh God, Shiro! We've been missing for weeks! Oh, this is a disaster."

Shiro sags in relief. He remembers. Okay, so he's also panicking and rambling, but… he remembers. He's not crazy - neither of them are. Hunk's back.

"How did we get here?" Hunk asks.

"We came on a mission to recruit the Tavi for the Alliance," Shiro says, and as he says it the memories come back stronger. "But they showed us the net…"

He trails off. The net - the station - he remembers the tour, and the growing sense of horror. And Allura, yelling at the Minister - getting into a huge row with him about the injustice of it. Calling it cruel and unethical… And then some kind of fight. Guards rushing in and his bayard in his hand and then - someone must have knocked him out, because after that it's just a blank. He rubs at his temples, and another memory slots into place.

"They send prisoners here," Shiro goes on. "They wipe their minds and control them, and put them to work on the shield generators. They did the same to us. That's why we didn't remember anything. It's why Blake could override my chip."

"All the overseers are Tavi," Hunk says. "The doctor, the Stat-Mas…"

"They're not overseers," Shiro tells him. "They're guards. When Allura found out, she was so angry. She got into a huge argument with the Defence Minister."

Not just about the nature of the punishment - the banishment from the planet and the gruelling, dangerous work on the stations. She was angry about the loss of autonomy, too. The lack of consent. The deception. And the fact that Tavi prisoners are never sent to the stations, no matter how heinous or violent their crimes. Most of the prisoners are Olkari or Bytors - minority communities on Heliana. Many of them were sent here for political crimes - for voicing their dissent at the way non-Tavi communities were treated planetside. And they were sent here - silenced, subdued, robbed of their memories and identities and put to work defending a world that treated them like dirt.

Rage burns through him like a fire, and it brings with it a sudden clarity on who he is and what he needs to do next. The confusion melts away and he reaches out in his mind, for someone he knows will always be there.

The Black Lion.

He forgot her. The chip blocked his connection, and that makes him furious beyond words. But when he reaches out, she rises up in his consciousness - huge and powerful and wide awake and alert, waiting for him. She tried to contact him; called out for him, sent out messages into the dark, wondering why his end of their connection had suddenly gone quiet.

Her feelings wash over him, clear and deep and powerful: relief that he is finally responding, and joy at sensing his presence again. And anger; a huge, fierce wrath that burns like the sun. Someone ripped him away from her - her Paladin, her bonded soul - and she's going to make them pay for it. She roars, somewhere far away, and Shiro gets the impression that she's coming for him.

"Uh… Shiro?" Hunk says.

Shiro snaps out of the Lion bond and back to the room, and refocuses on Hunk's worried frown. He holds their disconnected chips in his hand, and the little squares blink a lurid, unpleasant orange in the dim lights of the dorm.

An alarm.

_Fuck_.

Of course. This is a prison, and the prisoners are not allowed to remove their implants. They don't have much time.

"What do we do?" Hunk asks.

Shiro floods his arm with quintessence again, and takes the implants out of Hunk's hands. He crushes them easily between his metal fingers, and lets the pieces drop to the desk. It will buy them a little time, but not much.

"We need to get out of here," Shiro says firmly. "Black's coming for us. We need to get Allura, and get to an escape pod."

Hunk nods. "Why'd they lock us up?"

"I don't know," Shiro says. "But I intend to find out."

## +

Shiro eases open the door of their dorm, and slips out into the corridor, Hunk close behind him. There are no overseers in sight, and they hurry through the crowds, their heads down, heading towards the secret corridor where Allura is waiting.

As they dodge between the crowds, Shiro tries to estimate how much time they have. Not long, probably. His implant must have broadcast a signal as soon as he took it off. He didn't anticipate that - but then, he didn't think they were in a prison, being monitored and observed every waking moment. He curses under his breath and keeps going.

An overseer appears in the corridor ahead of them, and moves purposefully through the crowd in their direction. Not an overseer - a guard. The Tavi heads towards them, and Shiro grabs Hunk and ducks into another hallway.

Another guard appears, and Shiro gives up any pretence of sneaking around. He makes a break for it. He rushes the guard - and the Tavi doesn't expect it, and their eyes go wide as their frills spike out around their face - and Shiro barrels into them and bears them to the ground. He lands a few solid blows with his elbows and knees before he scrambles up, kicks out at the guard's stomach for good measure, and races down the hallway. Hunk follows him, muttering worried curses under his breath, but Shiro keeps going.

He has to get to Allura. Black will come; she's on her way already, roaring across the stars, cutting down anything in her path. So he needs to grab Allura and get them out of an airlock so the Lion can pick them up.

The crowds part around them as they turn another corner and weave through the press of people. Shiro scans the faces for more guards, but sees none so far. The exit from the life systems living quarters lies up ahead. Allura will come out that way, and they can intercept her and rescue her and get out of here.

But as Shiro pushes past a group of life systems workers chatting in the corridor, the doors to the dorms swing open, letting out the sounds of a commotion from the other side. Blake pushes through the doorway, flanked by two tall Tavi overseers.

She has Allura's arm, held tight and firm in one clawed hand.

Icy cold rage pours through Shiro's veins. Allura struggles against Blake's grip, her expression a mask of confused hurt and fear, but Blake holds firm. Shiro wonders, belatedly, if the chip and the dailies sapped Allura's natural strength.

"Ah, Shiro," Blake says. "Let's resolve this in a civilised fashion, shall we?"

"You locked us up!" Shiro yells. "You stole our memories! We're past being civilised. Let Allura go!"

The crowd murmurs around him, and he takes a step forward. Blake pulls out a long blade and holds it up to Allura's neck in warning.

"That's far enough, Paladin," she spits. "Surrender to the overseers, and let's straighten this up, shall we?"

Shiro has no idea what 'straighten up' means, but it's not going to be anything good.

But like Blake says, he's a Paladin. And the Black Paladin has a connection to space that defies distance. Which means he has a weapon. Always. He just has to summon it.

He concentrates, and the black bayard appears in his hand. He needs a throwing blade, so it becomes a knife, and he hurls it at Blake's body.

He moves so fast she doesn't see it - or expect it, from an unarmed prisoner - and the bayard sinks into her shoulder. She cries out and loosens her grip on Allura, enough for Allura to pull free of her grasp. The two overseers reach for their belts - for hidden weapons, probably - but Shiro doesn't give them time to get armed. He races for the first one, calling the bayard back to him as he goes, and it becomes a quarterstaff that he swings upwards into the guard's chin. He whips around - kicks out - and the guard crumples to the floor. The second guard rushes up behind him, but Shiro turns; lets the bayard become a katana and drives it through the guard's stomach. The guard sags to his knees, and Shiro punches him hard in the face.

He turns to find Allura staring at him, wide-eyed, and he curses under his breath. She saw this kind of thing all the time as a Princess, and as the commander of Voltron and then one of its Paladins, but she doesn't remember any of it.

"Takashi?" she breathes. "What's going on?"

Shiro pulls the bayard back into his grasp and reaches for Allura's hand. She flinches back. Something about him makes her tense up and pull away, and if they weren't in such a life-or-death hurry, Shiro might feel his heart break. As it is, he doesn't have time to dwell on it.

"Allura, you have to come with us," he says. "We're getting out of here."

"What happened?" she asks. "Did you take out your chip? She came to my room, she dragged me out… I don't understand what's going on."

"I'll explain it," Shiro says, as gently as he can manage. "But we have to go, now. We have to leave. We're not safe here."

"Shiro's right," Hunk adds. "You'll understand, Princess, but we gotta go."

Allura looks between the two of them, fear and confusion ghosting over her features. But she nods, still. This time, when Shiro reaches for her hand, she takes his willingly and follows him up the hallway. They leave the stunned crowd behind them, screaming or crying at the guards and the fight and the blood. Footsteps sound in the corridor; more yells and shouts, and the sound of pursuit. They're out of time.

They round a corner, and find a row of emergency escape pods embedded in the wall. Hunk pulls open the nearest one, and Shiro reaches out to Black to find out where she is.

Images and thoughts come back to him: his Lion, roaring up out of the atmosphere. They kept her in some kind of hangar, but she had her shield up the entire time, and they were powerless to prevent her from busting out as soon as she knew her Paladin was waiting for her.

"Where are you, Black?" Shiro whispers.

He feels the touch of her mind, and lets himself drop into her consciousness and see through her eyes. She is racing at speed towards the space station's orbit, zeroing in on Arandin and her Paladin, using his distress and adrenaline as a homing beacon. Shiro smiles grimly to himself, and climbs into the pod beside Hunk and Allura.

"Strap in," he says. "Black's on her way."

Hunk obeys without question, but Allura hesitates. She glances over her shoulder, at the station behind them, and looks at Shiro with tears in her eyes.

"What's happening?" she asks. "Why do we have to leave."

"I'll explain once we're safe, I promise." Shiro puts a hand on her shoulder, and she lets him guide her to a chair and pull down the safety straps for her. Her hands shake as she fumbles for the clasp, and Shiro sits down in the seat next to hers and secures his own harness.

"Punch it, Hunk!" he calls, and Hunk activates the pod.

The door slams down behind them and the pod ejects from the station and blasts out into space.

## +

Allura keeps her eyes closed as the escape pod tumbles gently over and over, before the gyros kick in and stabilise the craft. Shiro reaches out for Black again. She's close, and coming closer. The capsule jolts and shakes under them, and Shiro calls the Black Lion towards him, tugging on the tether between their souls, guiding her home. He peers out of the pod's tiny windows, scanning the stars until he spots her barrelling towards them in a blaze of light and heat and fury.

He glances at Allura. She clings tight to the seat and the straps holding her in place, her eyes screwed shut and her face tense with terror. She hates being outside - at least, she did on the station. The Princess Allura he remembers from before was fearless in the void. Something about the chip robbed her of that courage, and his anger blazes through him all over again.

Black roars towards them, huge and comforting and fierce, and her jaws open. The escape pod tumbles into her mouth, and they slide to a halt inside Black's hold. The landing isn't pretty, but that doesn't matter. Shiro hits the release on his seatbelt before they even stop moving, and leaps out of the pod and races for the cockpit.

This close, Black's mind rushes up to embrace him. He sits in the pilot seat and their thoughts overlap completely. He senses Black's joy at having him back; her anger and pain at having lost him for weeks.

"It's alright, I'm here," Shiro whispers. His hands wrap around Black's controls, and the Lion roars beneath him.

"Get us out of here," he says.

She hesitates. She wants to rain righteous fire down on the people who hurt him, but they need to get to safety first. He needs to see to Allura. Black subsides, in the face of his concern for her secondary Paladin, and they turn and head out of Heliana's orbit towards a distant moon. He finds a lonely crater and urges Black down to the surface, where she settles in the lunar dust and waits.

Shiro gets up and turns to leave, but as he does so, the cockpit's door slides open. Allura stands there, looking determined, and Hunk hovers behind her wearing an apologetic expression.

"I'm sorry, she wouldn't stay in the hold…" he says.

"It's fine, Hunk," Shiro says.

Allura looks up at him, and squares her shoulders. "What's going on? Why did you kidnap me?"

"I didn't kidnap you," Shiro says. "I promise."

"What is this ship?" she asks. "Is this the lion from your dreams? It's real?"

Shiro hesitates. He takes in her apprehensive expression, and the tense set of her shoulders and jaw, and the reluctance that clouds her eyes.

He doesn't know what to say to her. How can he possibly explain any of this? This time yesterday they were together, alone in their own secret haven, and he held her in his arms and ran his hands across her thighs and pressed kisses into her neck and… he blushes, and smothers a curse.

This is a mess. And the only way to fix it is to get Allura's chip off.

"It's hard to explain," he says. "The easiest way is to just take your implant out."

Her hand flies to the back of her neck. "No! Tell me what's going on first."

"Okay, fine, but… will you at least sit down?"

"Just tell me!"

He subsides in the face of her annoyance, and tries to explain it as best he can.

"The station is a prison," he says. "The implant suppresses memories. When I took mine off, I remembered… how we got here. What we're doing here. We didn't volunteer to work on the shield. We were part of something much more important than that."

Allura's expression crumples from annoyance to shock and confusion. Now, at last, she lets Shiro help her onto the low bench at the back of Black's cockpit. He kneels in front of her, and meets her gaze, and tries to gauge how much of this she believes.

"So this ship… this lion," she says, "is that… this is what we did before?"

"Yes. You flew this Lion with me. You just don't remember doing it."

"And if I take off the implant… I'll remember?"

Shiro nods. "You'll remember all of it."

The worried frown doesn't leave her face. She reaches for his hand - and he pulls back on instinct, because now he remembers why they can't be together like this. Why they were never together before, even if they desperately wanted to be. That strange sense that they were indulging in something forbidden… he finally understands where it came from. She is the Princess and he is her Paladin, and they work together, and they have to lead a team and an alliance together, and they cannot afford to let themselves get personally involved.

Allura catches his movement, and her face falls. She looks down at his hands and back up at his face, as if putting the pieces together.

"I'll change, won't I?" she whispers. "When I remember how things are supposed to be. That's why you changed so much, isn't it? Because things are different for us."

Her words cut like knives; they squeeze his heart like a vice. When he took off his implant, he didn't know what he was giving up. He didn't know how much he was about to lose. But… Allura knows. It's written all over her face: the knowledge that once she takes out the chip, whatever they had on Arandin station is well and truly over.

Of course he's different, now. Back then, he was just Takashi the comms tech; no responsibilities, no leadership duties, no Lion to fly. He didn't know what they were to each other, and he was free to be whatever he wanted. And what he _wanted_ was to flirt with her and make her smile and then run his hands through her hair and kiss her, and feel the way she melted into his arms… He pushes the thought down. Right now, he needs to fix things.

He lets himself soften into _Takashi_ ; lets the weight of leadership evaporate from his shoulders - imagines himself back on the station, just a lowly tech doing his job. He takes Allura's hand, and smiles at her, gently and sincerely. Her expression changes - less guarded, more open - as she takes in the change in his countenance.

"I'm not that different, am I?" he asks.

"I suppose not," she says.

"Trust me," he says. "Let me take off your chip."

She nods slowly. Shiro goes to pull his hands away, but her fingers tighten around his and she holds him in place.

"Takashi, wait…" she says, and he pauses.

She leans forward and kisses him gently on the lips. And he should pull away, but… he can't. She tastes so sweet and soft, and he lets himself melt into it, because he's fairly certain she won't do this again once she remembers everything.

The kiss is only brief, and then Allura sits up and squares her shoulders.

"Alright, I'm ready," she says. "Take it off."

Shiro lets his arm power up, and the blue-white glow spreads over his fingers. He grasps the implant on the back of her neck, and carefully pries it loose, until it pops out onto his palm.

Allura gasps and doubles over, her hands on her head, and Shiro holds her shoulder and tries to ease her through it.

"It's okay, it'll pass, just breathe. That's it."

She presses her knuckles to her forehead, and her eyes flutter open, and she meets his gaze.

"Shiro?" she says, and his heart sinks. _No more Takashi_. But she's back, and that's all that matters.

"Princess?" he says, and she nods slowly.

"It's okay, take your time."

She rubs at her temples and forehead and takes deep breaths and looks around at the Lion's cockpit to get her bearings. Finally, she looks up at Shiro and Hunk, and her expression hardens into something furious and fierce.

"What happened?" she demands. "The mission… the Defence Minister… why did he put us here? In this prison?"

"I have no idea," Shiro says. "But Black was in some hangar down on Heliana. Plus you… did yell at the Minister a lot about prisoners' rights and things."

"But he must have known that locking us up would cause all sorts of problems," Allura says.

"Speaking of which…" Hunk says. "Where's the rest of our team? Have they been trying to contact us?"

Allura gets up and strides over to Black's console, and pulls up a screen. Her frown deepens.

"There's dozens of messages stored in Black's relay," she says. "And hundreds of pings from the Castle."

"We didn't have our helmets," Shiro points out. "We couldn't receive any of them. The Tavi must have told Coran some story to deflect suspicion."

Allura nods absently. She scrolls through the unread messages - some videos, some audio, some just text - and she shakes her head.

"The others thought we had gone to inspect the station," she mutters. "And Black was still on the planet, so they didn't see any reason to worry. They asked for updates… the Tavi said we were studying the net in detail…"

"And that worked?" Shiro asks, one eyebrow raised.

"Not for long," Allura says wryly. "The messages got more urgent and suspicious as the weeks went by and we didn't answer. The Tavi must have deflected for as long as they could, but the most recent messages are encrypted. Let's see… Pidge is talking about getting past the shield and sneaking onto the planet to find out what happened to us."

"Are they down there now?" Hunk asks.

"Hard to say," Allura replies. "Pidge said they'd be cautious."

"So now what?" Hunk asks.

Allura straightens up, and turns to Shiro. Their eyes meet - and they are back, once again, to being co-leaders and work colleagues and nothing more.

"Let's hail the Castle," Shiro says. "Let them know what happened. And then I think we should head down to Heliana and get some answers."

## +

Shiro half-expects that they will have to fight their way into the Tavi government buildings and drag the Defence Minister out by his plumes - but in the end it proves unnecessary. When they check in with the Castle, they learn that Pidge and Lance are already planetside, trying to gather intel and getting stonewalled by government ministers. The Lions are, apparently, 'banned from Heliana' for 'security purposes', but that's not a problem for Black.

"Should we wait for back-up?" Hunk asks.

Shiro shakes his head. "No. Contact Pidge and Lance. Tell them to be ready. We'll go in and extract them, and then head back to the Castle. We can deal with the rest of this diplomatic mess later."

So Hunk pings Lance, and the response from Lance is a torrent of excited babble, followed by a location for the pick-up. Shiro sets Black's course towards Heliana, and Allura hails the official channel of the Defence Division.

"This is Princess Allura of the Voltron Alliance," she announces. "We are entering planetary atmosphere to extract two members of our team. Any attack on our Lion or our person will be taken as an act of war."

Shiro risks a glance at her where she sits beside him, in the co-pilot seat. Her face is set firm; her jaw tight. She looks furious - enough to issue a declaration of hostilities. How many weeks were they all locked up on the station, cut off from their friends or the outside world? Cut off from the people who need them. No wonder she's angry.

They come up on the net around the planet, and Shiro locks in on the coordinates for the rendezvous with Lance and Pidge. He concentrates - reaches out for Black's mind - and lets himself sink deep into her spirit. The net looms ahead of them, coming closer with each passing second; a shield of shimmering green dotted with the white specks of space stations.

He focuses on where he needs to be.

Black's wings open in a spray of white and a burst of quintessence, and Shiro pushes forward, utterly in tune with the Lion. Reality fades around them, and suddenly they are rushing through stars and darkness and flashes of colour. They phase right through the shield - right through the upper atmosphere - right through the planetary defences - until they come out ten miles above the planet's surface. The cold blackness of space gives way to bright sunlight glinting on the buildings below, and Black circles around the city and heads towards the rendezvous point.

They land just outside a complex of tall, glass-fronted government buildings, and emerge into a commotion. Tavi hurry backwards and forwards across the open courtyard, and guards run up to circle the Black Lion. She sits up and roars, and the guards slow down considerably. No one wants to be crushed under a giant metal paw.

Lance and Pidge emerge from one of the buildings, and their faces light up with recognition and relief. They rush across the courtyard towards Black - just as a door on the other side bursts open and a crowd of Tavi dignitaries push their way out into the sunshine.

Shiro groans. The last thing they need right now is a confrontation. He's tired and annoyed and he still has the remains of a memory-altering chip attached to his spine and he just wants to go _home_. But Allura tenses up beside him, and he senses that she wants answers, and she's going to do everything in her power to get them.

"There it is! The Lion!" One of the politicians points at Black, and the whole scheming crowd of them surge forward across the complex.

"Not so fast!" Lance calls. He drops to one knee, the blue bayard in his hand, and takes aim at the Tavi. The guards respond by raising their own weapons, but Black takes two huge, ground-shaking steps forward, and the Tavi subside. The politicians shuffle to a halt and all try to hide behind each other. They're at a stand-off.

Allura steps forward, heedless of the guards and their weapons, and holds up a hand. Even like this - in her worn out prison overalls, face grimy with tears and dust - she manages to look regal and commanding.

"Where is Defence Minister Mytok?" she demands.

A hasty, muffled conversation takes place in the gaggle of politicians, and then an older Tavi woman in a black robe steps forward and fans out her plumes.

"I am Chief Minister Olix," she says smoothly. "Princess, allow me to apologise for this misunderstanding."

"It's not a misunderstanding," Allura says bluntly. "You attacked us. You locked us up. We were robbed of our memories. We came here looking for peaceful allies, and this is how we were treated?"

"I assure you, Mytok acted alone," Olix says. "His rash actions were in no way supported by--"

"Like hell he did," Shiro spits. "Who else was in on this? He might have been the one who put us on that station, but you were all content to leave us up there to rot."

"The situation is… complicated," Olix stammers.

"Actually, it's pretty simple," Shiro says. "Mytok locked us up, and you let him get away with it. What could you possibly hope to gain from a stunt like this?"

Olix's eyes give her away. Her gaze flickers up to the Black Lion where she stands glinting in the sunlight - only for a moment, the briefest of seconds - but Shiro catches the movement. Another few puzzle pieces click into place. They thought, with Black's Paladins out of the way, that the Lion would be theirs.

"Where is Mytok?" Allura demands again.

There's another burst of aggrieved muttering from the politicians, but this time the raised voices sound rather more concerned. Shiro tries to make out the tides of the argument. Comments to the tune of 'hand him over!' and 'we should have put a stop to this' rise out of the increasingly chaotic conversation now taking place in the middle of the courtyard.

Shiro pinches the bridge of his nose. The urge to let Black stamp on all of them and have done with it is pretty appealing right now.

A panicked yell makes him look up, just in time to see Mytok dragged out of the crowd by a couple of his colleagues who have apparently decided that the winds of fortune do not currently favour the Defence Minister or anyone who sticks up for him. Mytok falls to his knees on the stone, and glares up at Allura.

Shiro pulls out his bayard and wills it into a halberd. He holds the axe head at Mytok's throat, lest he get any ideas about trying to get to his feet. The Defence Minister's eyes dart from him to Allura, and he subsides into surly resignation. The rest of the politicians go quiet, presumably out of a latent sense of self-preservation. No one wants to appear to be on Mytok's side right now. He's being hung out to dry.

"Why did you do it?" Allura asks. "You must have known how much trouble it would cause."

Mytok gives her a sullen look. "You made it perfectly clear how much you disapprove of our defence system. You never would have agreed to an alliance, anyway. You care more about the lives of criminals than the fate of the universe."

"And you wanted the Lion," Shiro says. It's not really a question. Now that the chip is off his neck, he can feel what Black went through while he was on the station - the memory trace of repeated efforts to get her to open up and connect to another pilot, and her steadfast refusal to do so.

"A Voltron Lion is a better prize than a lowly, subservient position in your Alliance," Mytok snaps. "You would have forced us to change our policies. Send actual citizens up to the shield stations. Once Heliana controlled the Black Lion, we would have controlled all of Voltron. Your Alliance would have been irrelevant. I did what was best for my people."

"He does not speak for all of us," Olix says smoothly, but Shiro glares at her, and she rapidly shuts her mouth and steps back.

"Why not just kill us?" Allura asks. "Why all the effort to keep us locked up?"

"Oh, you would have died eventually," Mytok says. "In a tragic accident aboard Arandin Station. What do you take me for? An amateur?"

"I mean… you did put me in a room with Hunk," Shiro mutters.

"You weren't supposed to remember! How did you even…?"

"The Black Lion," Shiro says coldly. "You forgot she's her own person, not just a machine. And she remembered everything, even when I didn't. Your implants couldn't block that bond."

Black purrs, somewhere behind him, and Mytok's eyes go wide. The plumes around his face bristle, but he says nothing.

"So did you instruct your guards to fuck with us personally, or is that just how they treat all your prisoners?" Shiro asks, irritation getting the better of him. He's too tired for this, and Mytok's face is begging to be caved in with a shovel.

Mytok gives him a cold, cruel smile. "You deserved to suffer before you died."

"Again, I feel compelled to clarify that his was a _minority_ viewpoint," Olix says, stepping up once more. "Many of us objected to Mytok's plans for your death, and argued _strenuously_ against your imprisonment."

"Not strenuously enough," Shiro tells her. "We spent weeks up there. What were you doing? Putting together a subcommittee?"

Another Tavi in the crowd raises his hand. "Actually there was a subcommittee formed to look at…"

He subsides in the face of Shiro's glare, and coughs awkwardly. Olix waves him back with a disapproving look.

"We're taking our people and leaving," Allura declares. "Don't try to stop us. And if you want to have any chance of being allies, I expect to see Mytok in a prison cell. Along with his lackeys on Arandin Station. This isn't over. Believe me."

"Anything that we can do to set this right, Princess, by all means," Olix says. She signals to a couple of guards, who step up and grab Mytok by the arms.

"Everyone - in the Lion," Shiro orders. The Paladins obey, and he hangs back with Lance as the others ascend the ramp. When he's sure they won't be followed or fired upon, he ducks up into the Lion and takes Lance with him.

Pidge runs up to him as soon as he enters the cockpit, and throws her arms around his waist in a hug.

"We figured out they sent prisoners to the stations," she babbles. "But we didn't know if you'd been imprisoned too, or which station you were on, and they had jammers on your biotracers and…"

"It's alright, Pidge," Shiro chuckles. "You did your best."

"I was going to fight the guards, but then we didn't want to start a war with the whole planet and Keith thought--"

"You too, Lance," Shiro says. He puts an arm around Lance's shoulders and pulls him into the hug, and the younger man stops talking and clings to him tightly.

"I was going to come and save you all," Lance says quietly.

"Missed you too, buddy," Shiro tells him.

He lets the pair of them go, and takes his seat next to Allura.

"Let's get out of here," he says.

Allura nods, and Shiro grips Black's controls, and the Lion soars up into the atmosphere, and they leave Heliana and Arandin station far behind.

## +

Their arrival back at the Castle of Lions is marked by barely-controlled chaos. They have been away for weeks, and in that time the messages have piled up and missions have been neglected and the concerned inquiries of their allies have gone unanswered. The mess of their enforced absence is going to take weeks to untangle.

Keith and Coran greet them as soon as they come out of Black's hangar, but the rest of the Castle's crew also crowd the halls as they make their way up to the bridge. Shiro is tired and jumplagged and irritable, and his sleep schedule is currently on a completely different cycle to the Castle's, but he can't rest yet. There's too much to be done.

They greet the bridge crew, and Allura makes a bit of a speech, but it's mostly just to let everyone see them alive and on their feet and back to business. Then they sit in the ready room just off the bridge so Coran can run through all the most urgent matters they missed while they were away, and Allura goes to answer her messages and make some calls to neglected allies, and Shiro finds himself with a to-do list the length of his arm and everything on it needs to be seen to… yesterday. Fuck.

He snatches a few hours of sleep after the initial, most pressing matters have been seen to, and then gets up and showers and shaves and puts on his uniform. Allura doesn't seem to rest at all; she is on the bridge or in her office, talking to everyone, scrolling through documents at lightning speed, trying to catch up. Shiro sees her intermittently, in between seeing to his own tasks, and at some point she changes out of the prison overalls, but she shows no signs of resting up.

"You should take a break," Shiro tells her, when he runs by her office with some documents. "Get some sleep."

She hums at him, noncommittally, and Shiro leaves her to it.

At some point, Shay turns up on a shuttle from one of the outposts. Shiro watches her rush to embrace Hunk, and feels a strange spike of relief. He wasn't crazy on Arandin. He didn't imagine her. She's a real person, and he remembered her in spite of the implant's effects.

Keith gives him the detailed debrief on the weeks he missed, as he shovels a meal into his mouth (breakfast? lunch? who knows, at this point) and downs a triple-strength coffee. The loss of half the Paladin roster in one swipe left the remaining team stretched thin, and Keith, Lance, and Pidge had to work double shifts at times to make sure none of their allies were in danger.

"We were able to scale back a lot of our activities, but it meant we weren't able to help people when we wanted to," Keith explained. "We needed Voltron."

Shiro groans, and rubs his temples.

"I'm gonna need more coffee to deal with this," he mutters, and Keith gets up to refill his mug. They were gone almost two months. Two months on Arandin Station, oblivious to the lives they left behind. Two months with Voltron utterly out of commission.

"Are you gonna get that metal shit taken out of your neck at some point?" Keith asks.

Shiro rubs the remains of the implant dock: a patch of metal bars still firmly embedded into his skin and attached to his spine, somehow. He keeps meaning to head down to the infirmary - he's got 8 messages on his personal tab from Lar'inla, the chief physician - but there's so much to be done in the meantime that he just hasn't gotten around to it.

"Yeah, I'll get it seen to," he says, and moves on to the next job on the list.

## +

It takes several days for the chaos to die down, and for Shiro to get back into the rhythm of the Castle's day-night cycle, and to stop falling asleep at odd times - on his desk or on the sofas in the lounge or in the Black Lion. Allura spends much of that time in fraught discussions with the Tavi leadership, in an attempt to see justice done for their imprisonment. Shiro, meanwhile, tries to get on top of missions and distress calls and all the rest of Voltron's neglected tasks.

Eventually - finally - he reaches a point where he can stop and breathe. There's still a lot to be done, but nothing urgent. There's plans in place to get back on track with the missions, and nothing is about to immediately fall apart. He huffs out a sigh and scrubs his face and stretches out the cricks in his neck and shoulders. Then he closes up his office and heads down to the med bay.

The Castle has a rota of medical staff, now, because the crew has grown considerably since their early days, and there's always a few personnel with injuries or illnesses. A row of cryopods line one wall, but many of the patients come in with ailments that are too minor for the pods, or require a more deft touch. Like Shiro's implant dock, for example, which is still firmly attached to his neck.

Lar'inla tuts at him. They're an Olkari, small and neat in their mannerisms, and they shoo Shiro into a side-bay and instruct him to get up on the gurney.

"I can't believe you left it this long," Lar'inla scolds. "Hold still. Let me look at it."

They inspect the implant's housing, and mutter under their breath. A scanner beeps, somewhere in Shiro's peripheral vision, and he tenses up instinctively. But he's not on Arandin anymore. He's not locked up. He takes deep breaths and wills his muscles to relax and unclench.

"You'll need surgery," Lar'inla tells him. "I can't do it right now. Can you clear your schedule for tomorrow?"

"I guess," Shiro says. "How long will it take?"

The medic rocks a hand back and forth. "A few hours? It's attached to your spinal column, and I'm worried about damaging the nerves if it's removed too quickly. It needs to be done slowly and carefully, and then you'll need to go in the pod for an afternoon to recover and let the wound heal."

A whole day lost. But it's better than walking around with this metal rig in his spine. He nods.

"Alright, I'll clear my diary," he says. "I suppose it's gotta be done."

"Yes. Sooner rather than later." Lar'inla makes a few notes on a data pad, and gives Shiro a smile. "And can you _please_ convince Princess Allura to come down and see me, as well? I've sent her a dozen messages, but she hasn't responded yet."

Shiro meets their gaze, and arranges his face into a carefully neutral expression.

"Sure. I'll talk to her."

Although quite what he's going to say, he has no idea.

## +

He goes to look for Allura, but she's not on the bridge or in her office. But there's a lounge where she likes to come and think - a more private living area than the communal breakroom, somewhat secluded from the Castle's bustle and activity. It's one of Allura's favourite spots - and sure enough, when Shiro takes the stairs down to the lounge and opens the door, he finds Allura standing by the long, narrow window that looks out on the stars. The room is furnished with lamps and pictures and shelves of curios, and a pair of large, white sofas sit around a low table in the middle of the floor.

Shiro pauses in the doorway, watching Allura's back as she leans against the window. They haven't really spoken much since Arandin, except on work-related matters. They've barely spent more than a few minutes alone since they returned. He tells himself they're not avoiding each other, and it's just work, but in the back of his mind there's this nagging anxiety. He doesn't know what to say to her. He doesn't know how to address what happened between them, even though he feels like they should talk about it.

The door closes, and Allura turns at the sound, and Shiro clears his throat. He crosses the room to stand next to her, and she gives him a tight smile.

"Shiro. What can I do for you?"

His heart sinks, even though he has no right to expect anything else but detached formality from her. A Princess and her loyal Paladin, forever bound by their duties. But he misses the way she smiled at him on Arandin; misses the easy warmth of it, and the playful spark that came into her eyes.

"Lar'inla says you haven't been to the med bay," he says. "You need to get your implant taken out. Properly."

Her hand goes automatically to her neck, and she lowers her gaze away from him.

"Oh - yes." She coughs. "I've just been busy. Thank you for reminding me. I'll head down there."

"You better go soon," Shiro says. "Otherwise you'll get me in trouble."

She gives him a tiny smile. "I'll go tonight. Don't worry."

Shiro hesitates. But the last real conversation they had was in the Black Lion, when he convinced her to take out her implant. The weight of unspoken words hangs in the air.

"How are you doing, anyway?" he asks.

Allura brightens up, but it's a brittle kind of brightness. She smiles and clasps her hands together in front of her, very formal and dignified, and meets his gaze.

"I'm doing well, actually, considering the circumstances," she says. "I have assurances from the Tavi leadership that Mytok and his associates are in jail. Including Blake and Chahar. And we have a firm commitment that they will reconsider their sentencing practices, in exchange for the assistance of the Voltron Alliance.

"I also spoke to several civic groups about their concerns regarding the treatment of political prisoners. It turns out there are many activists and opposition leaders who were sent to the stations because they were critical of Heliana's government. So I've promised Voltron's support in their efforts to get those convictions reviewed and the political prisoners released. Our time on the stations caused quite a stir, apparently, but hopefully some good will come of it in the long run."

She finishes the speech the way she started: straight-backed, perfectly composed, the very picture of the Princess and leader. Shiro suspects she misunderstood his question on purpose.

"That's great, really," he says. "But actually I was asking… how are you feeling? You know. About all of this."

Her expression softens, and for a moment she looks like Allura Melnori, the life systems tech, and not the Princess of Altea. She looks out at the stars wheeling past the window, and her shoulders hunch up almost imperceptibly. But after a year working alongside her, Shiro picks up on the movement, and what it signals. She's troubled. And unhappy.

"I feel… violated, I suppose," she says quietly. "My memories were erased. My free will was overridden. I don't like that feeling."

"Me neither," Shiro says, and Allura looks up at him. Her eyes search his face, but she says nothing.

"You know, if you want to talk about…" Shiro offers.

She straightens up, and the momentary vulnerability fades away.

"I think it's best if we don't talk about anything that happened on Arandin Station," she says. "Especially not…"

She trails off, and looks away - at the window or the ceiling or her feet.

"You mean what happened between us?" Shiro says. "Because I think that's something we should discuss."

"What's there to say?" Allura asks. Once again, her gaze locks to his, and a storm of feelings clouds her eyes before she pushes it down and collects herself. "We were different people, there. We weren't leaders or Paladins. We were just two strangers, acting on a superficial attraction, because we didn't know any better. But that's over, now. We need to re-focus on our task and our mission."

"The implant didn't change our personalities," Shiro protests. He desperately wants to reach for her hand, but she remains stiff and tense and withdrawn and there's nothing he can do to reach her. "We weren't different people. And I don't know how it was for you, but for me… that chip didn't make me feel anything I didn't already feel. Or want anything I didn't already want. It just made me act on it. That's all. Maybe that's not what happened for you, but that's how it was for me."

Allura hugs her arms around herself, and chews on her lip. Shiro wonders if she wants to disbelieve him - to challenge him - to accuse him of lying. But he's telling the truth, and they both know it. They let whatever was growing between them go unspoken and unacknowledged, but Allura isn't a fool and neither is he. All Arandin Station did was free them up to act on something they both felt for a long time.

He wants her to admit it. Maybe that's a selfish impulse, but he's already feeling like he can't trust his own mind and a part of him needs to hear her say that it's real. He didn't imagine her feelings for him, just like he didn't imagine Shay or Voltron or the Lion or any of the rest of it.

"You're right. It was the same for me." She looks up at him with tears in her eyes, and even though he wants to hear it, he suddenly dreads the words and the pain they'll bring. "I felt those desires before. But we both know we can't act on them, now. Otherwise, I would have--"

She stops, and bites back whatever words are trying to spill out of her.

"We have a war to win," she goes on. "We are leaders, and we work together. We can't let ourselves get personally entangled like this. It would complicate everything, mess up the team dynamics… it's a distraction. And we can't afford that. There's too much at stake."

Maybe she's right. Those are all good, solid reasons that Shiro has repeated to himself many times, over the months they've known each other. But that was before. Now, he knows what it's like when they're together. He knows exactly what he's missing out on: her easy smiles, the softness of her lips against his, the warmth of her body in his arms and the delicate sound of her laughter and just… just all of it. When they were together, it was like magic. And he doesn't want to give that up.

"We could make it work," he says, aware of how desperate it makes him sound and not caring. "If you wanted to. We could figure something out."

Allura shakes her head. "I can't. I… I can't justify this. We would be putting our own feelings above the wellbeing of the whole universe. Everyone relies on us. On _me_. I can't let myself do something this selfish."

"Allura, come on. It's not selfish to want to be happy," Shiro says. "We were happy, weren't we?"

She meets his gaze, her eyes full of sorrow, and she lays a gentle hand on his jaw.

"I can't, Shiro," she whispers. "I'm so sorry."

He wants to lean into the touch, but she pulls her hand away. She hesitates; and Shiro wonders if she wishes she could say something else, or take back what is already said, or if she just wants to linger beside him for a few more seconds before they are parted. But there is nothing left to say. She turns and leaves the room, and Shiro watches the door close behind her.

He looks out of the window, and blinks back the tears that make the stars blur and fracture into prisms of light. He scrubs a hand over his face. The universe moves on, outside the window, and he is once more alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ngl i cribbed the idea for this fic from an episode of _Stargate SG-1_ , but it's one of those ideas that i think works better as a fanfic than it does in a canon work. props to everyone who guessed what was going on!


	4. Offerings

The days turn into weeks, and Arandin Station fades into nothing but a memory, and the Castle settles back into a routine. There are missions to fly and allies to assist and training rotas and meetings and plenty of distractions, and Shiro throws himself into all of it. It's easier than sitting around dwelling on what he's lost.

Allura does not talk about Arandin at all, except in abstract terms. The Tavi are still eager to join the Alliance, and negotiations continue around Mytok's fate and the future of the net and the stations. In these discussions, Allura speaks only of their 'imprisonment'; the precise details of what that entailed are left unsaid. Shiro respects her wishes and avoids mentioning it, but he hopes Allura talks to _someone_ about what happened. Knowing her, she's bottling it all up inside, or confessing it only to her pet mice.

Normally, if they went through something like this, Shiro would be the one to talk to her about it. He'd find her in her office or the break room and bring her tea and ask her what's on her mind, and after some idle chat about work matters she would open up and confide in him about her worries. It became a habit, prior to their stay on Arandin Station; but now, that avenue is firmly closed. He can't offer her a sympathetic ear and a shoulder to lean on anymore, and that hurts almost as much as losing her in the first place.

She remains studiously polite and respectful towards him, which in theory ought to help matters; but instead each instance of composed courtesy lands like a lead weight in his soul. How is it so easy for her to act like nothing happened? The sting of this peculiar kind of heartbreak sits with Shiro every day, and he glances over at Allura and wonders if she can bounce back so easily because it meant less to her than it did to him. But then he'll catch her looking fondly at him, her eyes full of sorrow she hastily blinks away, and he wonders if it's not as easy as she makes it seem.

He has no right to ask her for anything. She made her feelings clear. But sometimes, when he catches one of her longing glances in spite of her best efforts to hide them, he wonders if he should bring it up again. He just doesn't know what to say.

## +

Hunk doesn't tell anyone about their romantic misadventures on Arandin; a small mercy for which Shiro is incredibly grateful. He would rather avoid any discussion of it with the others. Hunk, meanwhile, has his own wisdom to share on the matter.

"I don't think it would bother anyone if you were together," he says, when they're sitting in the kitchen one evening. "It certainly wouldn't surprise anyone."

Shiro squints at him suspiciously. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing!" Hunk says. "Just… You know. You're basically work-married already. And you're always making really obvious heart-eyes at each other when you think no one will notice."

Shiro groans, and lets his head thump down on the worktop. _Great_. That's just great.

"So everyone knows, is what you're saying," he mutters from his prone position.

Hunk pats him on the head. "Yeah buddy. Everyone knows."

Shiro unfolds just enough to glare up at him. "You're awfully over-familiar ever since we got back from Arandin Station. You used to call me 'sir'."

Hunk shrugs. "Yeah, well. Now I've seen the real you. The lovesick dork who can't talk to people he likes because he's too nervous. It's kinda cute, actually."

His words make Shiro sit up, and he regards Hunk thoughtfully. "You think that's the real me?"

Hunk pauses in the act of lining up mugs under the drinks machine, and mulls this over.

"I think it's a side of you that you don't let people see very often," he says. "But that doesn't mean it's not real. It's just another part of you. Like… you weren't wildly different from how you normally are, you just let a different part of yourself out. If that makes sense."

"I guess," Shiro admits.

"Plus you were madly in love with Allura," Hunk points out. "That's pretty consistent for you."

Shiro glares at him. "I'm still your leader, you know," he says.

"Mmmhhmm. Does the decisive head of Voltron want marshmallows in his hot chocolate?"

Shiro looks from Hunk's face to the mugs of cocoa set on the counter, and his annoyance subsides in the face of Hunk's amused smirk.

"Yes please," he mumbles.

He can't bring himself to be too mad, because it's a relief to actually be able to talk to someone about the whole mess. And it's reassuring to hear someone say that what happened on Arandin was real and genuine, and not simply a fever-dream cooked up by a mind-altering implant. He can't stand the thought that it was all fake. That would make everything worse, somehow.

## +

Sometimes, he takes the Black Lion out on long solo flights just to clear his head and take his mind off his heartache.

"What do you think, girl?" he asks Black, as they drift past lonely asteroids in search of some peace. Black rumbles gently. She doesn't really understand the issue. Shiro wants Allura, and Allura wants Shiro. Therefore, they should be together. Problem solved.

"People are complicated," Shiro tells her. "You must have realised that by now. You're ten thousand years old."

This time, the rumble is a little more humorous. She does understand that perfectly well, she just thinks it's silly, and Shiro smiles.

"You're probably right," he says. But it doesn't help him in his efforts to decide what to do.

## +

At least the negotiations with the Tavi leadership go well. The imprisonment of three Voltron Paladins on the space stations has some ripple effects, and the rumours from Heliana suggest that an election will be held soon, and a change in government is likely. In the meantime, the remaining officials seem eager to co-operate with the Alliance.

In an effort to enact some damage control, they agree to share schematics for their planetary protection net. Building an entire planet-sized replica will take time, but Pidge and Hunk set to work on applying the net's principles to the Castle's defensive shields. The result is a series of modulators that will boost the shield's power considerably. Some of them are installed within the Castle itself, but the last two need to be fitted outside, at key points on the Castle's exterior.

Shiro volunteers for the EVA, because the information the Tavi uploaded into his brain about the net and how it works is all still up there, somehow, even though the implant has long since been removed. Much to his surprise, Allura volunteers to go with him. Hunk remains on the Castle to oversee and co-ordinate the installation, and Shiro loads the modulators into Black and powers out of the hangar, Allura beside him in the co-pilot seat.

## +

The first installation goes smoothly, especially with Allura's help. They stick to talking only about work topics, because it's safer, and Shiro lets the complex task at hand distract him from his own suppressed desire to spill his feelings at Allura and beg her to take him back. He could do without making himself look desperate. They have to run an intergalactic Alliance together, after all.

But he _is_ desperate. She is always on his mind, no matter how far they are from each other; no matter how little they talk. The ache in his chest never leaves him be.

They finish the first installation and move on to the next, taking the Black Lion up to the highest peak of the Castle and the point where the shield generator sits housed in the central spire. Black circles above them as they position the second modulator and work to bolt it in place. The Lion has been more protective ever since what happened on Heliana, and even on a mission like this she is watchful and alert and ready.

Once they get the modulator situated, Shiro holds it in place whilst Allura tightens the bolts, and then they work together to attach the connectors. Hunk chatters away in Shiro's earpiece, using the vid feeds from their helmets to guide them through the process, and they work swiftly and smoothly. Not for the first time, Shiro is struck by how easily Allura falls into sync with him, and how effortlessly they work together, even without the need for conversation.

"I think it's done," she says, when the last joint is locked into place. "Should we test it?"

"Hold on, I'm running diagnostics," Hunk says over the earpiece. "You might wanna get clear of the area though. So we can turn it on without. You know. Blasting you both out into space."

"Copy that," Shiro says. He activates the jetpack on his Paladin armour, and heads up and out of the radiation zone of the modulator. Allura does the same, and she accelerates past him with an easy grace, swooping in a wide curve towards Black. Against the backdrop of stars, the lights of her armour glimmer like a beacon.

She hated EVAs when they were on Arandin. And yet out here… she's a natural. Where did that fear of the void come from? What part of her memories did the chip supress to make her so anxious and scared of being outside?

Shiro trails after her, letting his jetpack do the work, and Black picks up their direction and flanks them protectively as they leave the Castle behind and put themselves at a safe distance from the shield. Allura's laugh ripples over the comms - so full of joy and enthusiasm - and Shiro's heart skips a beat. He hasn't heard her sound so happy in weeks.

"Alright, you're far enough," Hunk tells them. "You'll be outside the shield once I activate it. I'll run some tests and then you can come back inside. Just hang tight."

"Got it," Shiro says. He brings himself to a halt and turns to look back at the Castle. Allura circles around him and drifts to a stop, and they hang there together in the endless sky, looking down on the ship below and ahead of them.

The shield activates, and the usual white-blue glow now has a greenish tint to it. The sound of Hunk muttering to himself echoes back over the comms, and he instructs them both to hold position and wait. Shiro studies the shield, and the glowing blue-green lines. It reminds him of Arandin, and the time they spent working the nets. And the time he spent with Allura. He can't seem to escape it, or forget it. Maybe he should stop trying.

"This reminds me of the station," Shiro says. He lets the words hang there, drifting against the stars; and at first he thinks Allura will ignore them and pretend she didn't hear.

"It does, doesn't it?" she says quietly. He glances over to find her staring at the shield with a faraway look in her eyes.

"Do you want to know the oddest thing?" Allura says. "On Arandin, I was terrified of going outside. I completely forgot how to do an EVA. And yet you remembered perfectly. I wonder why."

"I don't know," Shiro says. "I don't know why we forgot certain things and remembered others." _Like how I felt for you_ , he thinks. He couldn't forget it. No memory-altering implant would ever be powerful enough to erase that.

"I wasn't scared when I was with you." Allura's voice sounds almost dreamy. "And I think it was because… some part of me remembered our time together in Black. Even if I couldn't consciously recall it. I saw you and I trusted you, and I wasn't scared."

Her words sink in, and Shiro's heart aches all over again. Even on Arandin, when they remembered nothing about themselves or each other, she still trusted him instinctively. Allura looks up and catches him staring, and she clears her throat and turns her body away from him. The movement puts a sudden distance between them, and on instinct, Shiro reaches out and grasps her hand to pull her back.

"Don't drift away," he jokes. Allura meets his gaze, and the smile he offers, and smiles back. She pulls herself towards him, so that he is able to take her other hand in his and tuck their bodies next to each other.

"Why?" she asks, and there's a note of teasing in her voice he hasn't heard since their captivity. "Are you lonely?"

She means it as a joke. Of course she does. And he should probably treat it that way. But beneath the humour is an invitation; an offered-up space into which he can slot the truth, if he wishes.

"I'm lonely all the time," Shiro confesses.

Allura looks at him from inside her helmet, and her expression softens.

"Me too," she whispers.

They hang there in the sky, just them and the stars, and Shiro watches her face, and the storm of emotions that dances in her eyes. Out here, where the emptiness of the void strips them of any defences, it's harder to hide the truth. Maybe this is the only place where they can be honest with each other.

He comes to a decision.

He reaches up and switches off the comm link on the side of his helmet, and Hunk's chatter fades and dies, leaving nothing but silence behind. Allura's eyes go wide, but she doesn't make any move away from him. He reaches out - gently, tentatively - and switches off her comm unit too. He pulls her head towards his, until their visors bump together, and the sound of her breathing echoes through his helmet and mingles with his own.

"I miss you," he says simply.

"You see me every day," she says.

"Not the way I want to."

Her head tilts to one side, her expression full of sympathy and regret, and she lets the silence grow soft and sad between them.

"Shiro…" she whispers, and the name stings like a cut. Because they used to be closer, and she used to call him something else, and now they're apart and he still wants her desperately and he doesn't know how to bring her back to him.

"I miss what we had," he says. "We were happy together. I want it back."

He doesn't care that it's raw. It's honest, and that's all that matters.

"We can't," Allura says, but there's an uncertainty in her voice that wasn't there before.

"Why not?" he asks.

He waits for her to give him a reason. She must have plenty. But none are forthcoming. Instead she takes a deep breath and purses her lips, still watching his face and never looking away, as if she wants to memorise all of his features in minute detail.

"What are you suggesting?" she asks. "That we… we come back off a hard battle and then park up Black and go for a nice romantic dinner together? That in between trying to save the universe we use our free time to what? Hold hands and watch movies and feed each other popcorn? Really?"

"Yes, that is exactly what I'm suggesting," Shiro says. "Literally all of those things."

He grins at her, and her attempt at a stern lecture melts away. Maybe she wants to be won over. He has to at least try.

"We can't," Allura says.

"Why not?"

"Because it's selfish!" she says. "And I don't--"

She stops, and bites back the words, and looks away from him. But here, with their helmets pressed together, the truth flows more effortlessly than the easy lies they have told themselves over and over again.

"You don't what?" Shiro asks softly. "You don't deserve to be happy?"

Allura meets his gaze, and tears prick her eyes. She doesn't need to answer his question. He knows she thinks that - knows she believes it, on some deep, unspoken level. The guilt of surviving a horror that stole her family away weighs heavy on her heart, even now.

"Why should I get to be happy?" she asks. "When my family and my people are all gone?"

"You think they would want you to be miserable?" Shiro says.

She doesn't answer. She holds onto his waist and gazes at him from within her helmet, cut off and yet connected, close enough to touch - but only through protective glass.

"I know you think it's selfish," Shiro says. "But it's really not. You've given up so much for this fight. You've worked harder than any of us. You've struggled and sacrificed and worked yourself to the bone keeping this team together. Building this Alliance. You don't need to keep proving your own selflessness by burning yourself out."

"As if you would ever let me," Allura says. A wry smile pulls at her lips; guarded and uncertain and waiting to emerge into the light.

"You're right," Shiro goes on. "I would never let you. Because you deserve to rest and have fun. And to take care of yourself. You don't have to punish yourself by pushing everyone away. And I don't know about you, but I'm tired of being lonely."

That smile cracks out again, a little stronger this time.

"You deserve to be happy," Shiro tells her. "And you deserve to have someone in your life who's waiting for you after a long day, to make you laugh and take your mind off things. You deserve to be _loved_ , Allura. And I would like to formally apply for that position. Not to brag, but… I think I'd be pretty good at it."

This time, he gets a laugh out of her. Not much; more a breath of surprise and amusement; but her face crinkles and her eyes sparkle and she suddenly looks like she did on Arandin, when he held her close and kissed her under the stars. He gives her his most convincing and charming smile, and she smiles back at him, and he can't tell if he's won her over or left her lost for words.

"You would be really good at it," she whispers.

Black roars, somewhere alongside them. Her jaw drops open, and she scoops them up, still clinging to each other, and pulls them both into her cockpit. They drift towards the floor, and the artificial gravity kicks in. Shiro helps Allura find her feet, and they stand there inside Black, the controls humming around them, and stare at each other through glass.

What comes next?

Shiro reaches for his helmet; pulls it off, discards it on the bench. Then he reaches for Allura's, and lifts it clear of her head and lays it aside. She unpins her hair and lets it out of its bun, and it falls in waves around her head like a cloud of starlight.

Shiro steps up to her and pulls his gloves off. He runs a hand into her hair; feels the softness of it between his fingers, and the way she leans almost imperceptibly into the touch.

"Takashi…" she whispers, and she makes his name sound like a charm against all the hardship in the universe. He pulls her closer, and she comes willingly, her hands around his waist.

"Will you let me love you?" he murmurs, and she smiles. Her eyes dart to his lips, and he knows her answer even before she speaks.

"You're making a very compelling argument for it," she whispers, and he grins.

He kisses her slowly; delicately; as if he has never kissed her before. And yet he already knows his way around the soft sweetness of her lips; he already knows the taste of her tongue as it slips into his mouth. It is new and yet not; the same as before and yet vastly different. She runs her hand down his jaw and draws him closer and kisses him so deeply he feels stars pour into his veins.

He remembers how it felt to fall for her even when they were strangers, and he knew nothing about her except that she liked chocolate pudding and wore her hair in a braid. And it was sweet and wonderful and perfect, but this - right here - this is better: to know her and admire her and see all her flaws and rough edges, and love her all the more for it.

She breaks away and looks up at him, slightly out of breath, her marks glowing pink on her cheeks.

"You were right," she says. "You are pretty good at this."

He chuckles, and pulls her into another kiss, and she smiles as their lips meet. The Black Lion roars into the sky, and circles back towards the Castle to take them home.

## +

Allura comes to his room later, once the night shifts have started and everyone on day duty is in bed. They usually have a few hours of leisure time to themselves every evening, and so now Allura is here. In his room. Spending her leisure time with him.

Shiro opens the door and finds her standing there in a dress. Not her usual long gown, but something shorter and slinkier and altogether more casual. She has her hair down and she smells of… fruit or flowers or something else sweet and intoxicating.

"Hey," she says. She smiles, even though she looks nervous and her hands twist together. This is brand new territory for both of them. Even on the station, Allura never came to hang out in his actual _room_.

"You look nice," he manages, and Allura blushes, and tucks her hair behind her ears.

"Uh. Come in," Shiro says, because otherwise he'll stand here all evening staring at her.

His room is larger than the original bunk he slept in all those months ago when they first got here; it has a separate alcove for the bed, a sitting area - even a tiny kitchenette in one corner where he makes midnight snacks. Allura steps inside and looks around as if she doesn't know what to do. Shiro's not entirely sure either. He promised her dates and fun and time spent together, but now that she's here, he's faced with the question of how to navigate their shifting reality.

"I've been thinking," Allura says. She takes a deep breath and meets his gaze. "If we're going to do this, we should have some rules."

"Okay… like what?" he asks.

"We have to act appropriately in front of the others," she says, and he nods.

"This can't become a distraction," she goes on. "It can't get in the way of our mission."

"It won't, I promise." He smiles at her where she stands by his door, nervously toying with her hands. "Anything else?"

"Can I call you Takashi? When it's just the two of us?" She bites her lip and waits for his answer - as if she is asking some huge favour. When in fact the very idea of it fills him with warmth.

"Of course you can," he says, and her face breaks into a delighted smile that she tries to hide by looking at the floor.

She is absolutely going to be the death of him some day, Shiro realises. He is going to fall so deeply in love with her that she will define his very concept of beauty and goodness for as long as he lives. And he is going to accept that fate willingly, with his eyes wide open, because he can't think of anything he'd rather do with his life than spend it admiring her.

He reaches out and takes her hand, and she looks up at him.

"Come here," he says with a smile. She follows him to the sofa and sits down, and he goes to the kitchenette and takes out a chocolate pudding cup and a spoon.

"What's this?" she asks, as he hands them both to her and sits down next to her.

"I remembered how much you liked chocolate pudding on the station," Shiro says. "So I asked Hunk to make some."

She gives him that familiar shy smile, like she's trying to hide just how happy she is.

"Very smooth," she says.

"I thought so."

She grins, and takes a spoonful of the pudding. Her eyes light up as she tastes it, and she gets the same blissful, contented expression that Shiro remembers so fondly from Arandin.

"This is really good," she says. "Way better than on the station."

"I feel like we should have figured out that it was a prison based solely on the quality of the food."

Allura laughs, and helps herself to another mouthful of chocolate.

"It was awful, wasn't it?" she says.

"That coffee was a crime," Shiro chuckles.

"And that weird stew with the lumps in it."

She shudders, and dips the spoon into the pudding again. Shiro reaches out and snags her wrist with his fingers, and her eyes dart to his face. He shifts closer to her on the sofa, so that he can lean in and guide the spoon into his own mouth. The chocolate pudding tastes like heaven in a cup.

"That is amazing," he mutters.

Allura gives him a stern look as he sits up.

"I thought you didn't like chocolate pudding?" she says.

_Oh. Right._ He told her that on the station, as a pretext to save his dessert for her and sit with her as she ate it and her face lit up with one of Arandin's few pleasures.

"Actually… I just pretended I didn't like it," he confesses. "So I had an excuse to give it to you."

She sits there and stares at him, and her whole face goes soft.

"Why are you always so good to me?" she asks.

He catches a strand of her hair and twirls it between his fingers.

"Because you deserve it," he says simply. "And to be honest… I'm completely crazy about you. So I can't help it."

Her eyes go wide, and he watches as the last vestiges of doubt and hesitation melt away, and that beautiful, unguarded smile shines bright on her face.

She sets the pudding cup and the spoon down on the side table, very deliberately, and then she leans in and kisses him.

Even back on Arandin, she never kissed him quite so urgently and possessively as this. But they are no longer prisoners, or strangers. And so she swings her leg over his hip and straddles his lap and kisses him like she can't breathe without him. Hot fire runs through Shiro's veins, and he buries his hand in her hair and holds her close and tastes the chocolate pudding on her tongue as she presses it into his mouth.

She pulls back and smiles at him, and it is as warm and bright as a sunrise. The desire she has always pushed down and denied burns warm and fierce in her eyes.

"I missed you, Takashi," she says. "I missed being yours."

He grins back at her. Having her in his lap like this makes it hard to think straight, especially with her skirt hitched up around her thighs and her hands in his hair and her body pressed up against him. Not that it really matters. Because he's done thinking. He's going to kiss her again and carry her to his bed and pull that dress off and run his hands over every perfect inch of her, and none of those things require much brain power. The instinct to love her as deeply and completely as he can is engraved onto his very soul.

"You can be mine for as long as you want, Allura." He whispers it against the skin of her throat, and she shivers and clings to him, and pulls his head back up to claim his lips once more. He kisses her like a promise, like a pledge: that he will love her no matter what, and make her smile any way he can, and give his days and nights to her happiness. Because she deserves all that and the universe; all that and more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much for everyone who read and commented and followed along for this! hope the ending made up for that angsty swerve in the middle :3 for this fic i leaned into my personal headcanon that Allura is Black's co-pilot because she flew Black temporarily after Shiro disappeared. also i always loved the idea of the Castle of Lions getting a bigger crew as the story went on so i added that too. thank you for all the love and support along the way! <3

**Author's Note:**

> i stole The Helmet Trick from _The Expanse_ , which is a pretty cool SF show (that i'm a season behind on rip) if you're into that kind of thing. also i decided to include Hunk because he doesn't get enough love, dammit.


End file.
